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Scale of the Universe
- corinroyal 2y agoOMFG! This is fantastic! And apparently I have some things to learn about web design.
- a_c 2y agoMagnificent! Curious how the zoom interaction is managed? Do you load assets of next level once zoom level hit a certain threshold?
- Leftium 2y agoMy guess is all the assets are preloaded. They are gradually added to the "stage" and shrunken/faded out based on the zoom level on an item-by-item basis (vs zoom levels.) The background color would be its own "item." I actually came across this site because I was looking for an example for a proposal for a fun project for this guy: https://youtu.be/1kjvgWBHzec https://youtu.be/1kjvgWBHzec (he tried a couple of non-programming video editing methods to achieve the zoom effect.)
- vbezhenar 2y agoIt seems all images are stored in the file https://cdn.scaleofuniverse.com/sotu-avif.dave https://cdn.scaleofuniverse.com/sotu-avif.dave with some format I don't really know. It's some kind of container for avif images. It's loaded once.
- paperdave 2y agoloading everything upfront (a loading bar) was a better trade off than having unloaded images if you scrolled too fast. making each image a separate file was not very efficient for basically every reason. i ended up writing my own streamable archive format called an "asset bundle". it is essentially all resources concatenated. that code is public -> https://github.com/paperdave/assetbundle https://github.com/paperdave/assetbundle the scale of the universe webapp loads all the assets, but then pixi.js objects are dynamically created and destroyed depending on the scale. i never fully verified but i hope does the right thing and keeps sprite data out of vram when it's not needed.
- wruza 2y agoSee also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5qTdb6LbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5qTdb6LbM ◄ AGE of UNIVERSE ► TIME in perspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)
- alok-g 2y agoThe second one is WOW. Thanks for sharing.
- someplaceguy 2y ago> The second one is WOW. Indeed! Now assume that the many-worlds interpretation is accurate and you will live through most of that, if quantum immortality [1] turns out to apply to the real world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
- necovek 2y agoLooks lovely! Too bad there are no hits when searching for the "Restaurant at the end of the Universe" :)
- MOARDONGZPLZ 2y agoThis is amazing. I always have this thought experiment of taking this back like 200 years and imaging how people would react to the things we’ve discovered in our world and thinking about how much it would progress the technology of the era.
- redog 2y agoYou'd probably be persecuted and hung.
- kromem 2y agoI would imagine they'd be more surprised about the smartphone in front of their faces. I just hope after extensive explanation and looking at the showcase they'd eventually ask what a Minecraft world was and why it was both flat and bigger than Earth.
- robertlagrant 2y agoThis is really moving! It's like a 2020s version of that old video[0] (there are 2!)[1] that zooms in and out of scale. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 (1977) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44cv416bKP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44cv416bKP4 (1996)
- bogtog 2y agoI think this Zoom in/out physics story has pretty widely been told. Here is one by CPG Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI I like the one OP linked here. All the objects being clickable with a little description is nice
- pytness 2y agoTIL the porcine virus is only ~106 carbon atoms wide.
- wdfx 2y agoTIL that the Burj Khalifa is taller than Vatican City is wide.
- ralegh 2y agoFor a second I thought we'd seen a lot of the universe, the HDF being 1/5th the radius away and on googling Earandel is 2/3rds the radius... of the known universe. "According to the theory of cosmic inflation initially introduced by Alan Guth and D. Kazanas, if it is assumed that inflation began about 10−37 seconds after the Big Bang and that the pre-inflation size of the universe was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present the entire universe's size is at least 1.5×1034 light-years—at least 3×10^23 times the radius of the observable universe." So, if true, all those metrics of atoms, stars, planets in the known universe are multiplied by 10^23. Even if intelligent life were rare enough to only appear once per knowable universe, there could be 10^23 different intelligent species - single planet to galaxy spanning empires - that would probably never meet another intelligent species (except those with the same ancestors).
- mariusor 2y ago> if true, all those metrics ... are multiplied by 10^23 Considering the relation of radius to volume, shouldn't we add a meager 3 to make the exponent a total of 26? (Assuming of course that the universe is just a three dimensional volume. :D)
- deepsun 2y agoThe problem is in words "at present". There's no some global timeline to say "present". The time in far away places just didn't happen yet. UPDATE: minor consideration -- time can flow at different speeds (e.g. gravitational wells). That's probably doesn't matter to our discussion, but just another argument against "at present".
- NayamAmarshe 2y agoI love the end of it, just a big circle of random static noise. Looking at stuff like this always brings up the question of why does anything exist at all?
- kromem 2y agoThe counterpoint to that thought is why we should think non-existence is even possible. There doesn't seem to be any indication that nothing could exist other than our capacity to imagine it being so. It's what's so annoying with people arguing about "something from nothing." Even a vacuum has zero point energy. The idea that there could even be 'nothing' at any point in time is arguably a bigger leap of faith than the notion of some deity for whose sake it is being argued as a presupposition.
- NayamAmarshe 2y ago"Something from nothing" is a flawed argument, I agree. It's just like saying everything came from , because 'nothing' doesn't represent anything at all. However, the idea that "'nothing' is impossible" still doesn't make sense to me. If the reality allows for infinite possibilities then one of the possibilities must be of 'nothingness'. This is what Buddhists argue, that reality is śūnya or 0/null/void, and that we exist only momentarily in this nothingness somehow but you can see how that argument is flawed too. Then comes sāṁkhya that says there are 2 entities: The observer and the thing which is being observed. The observer (individual consciousness or puruṣa) is eternal, has no point of origin and no end. Similarly, prakṛti or nature also exists at the same time because the observer needs an observation but prakṛti's nature is to change all the time, it manifests and unmanifests (just like our bodies or everything else in this universe made of dead matter). However, even though prakṛti keeps this constant of change, the observer or puruṣa himself is unchanging (just like how our bodies and every single cell in it keep changing but the sense of 'I' remains the same somehow). On top of that, it says the prakṛti and puruṣa are mutually exclusive. They do not mix like oil and water but remain in contact at the same time, just like how we have material bodies that keep changing but the 'I' or the observer inside it is not made of prakṛti and hence remains detached from it. It is only the false-ego (or false-'I') of puruṣa that forces it to identify itself with prakṛti (like I'm a male, I have this job, this is my family, I have this body and face, etc.).
- blowski 2y agoTIL - All humans stood on top of each other would be significantly taller than the diameter of the Sun.
- prmph 2y agoCool. And yet all humans alive, if packed like sardines, will fit in a 1 mile cube, with room to spare. Physical dimensions can be an amazing un-intuitive thing.
- blowski 2y agoGosh, you're right. Assuming: - 5,250 can stand front to back - 3,500 side-by-side - 750 on top of each other That's more than 13 billion humans you could fit in said cube.
- swader999 2y agoThat would get pretty stinky though.
- blowski 2y agoThe "What If?" books by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) cover topics like this with that kind of thought process.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoAlso pretty hot, since if I remember correctly, the waste heat of a human is higher per volume (or was that mass ?) than of the sun !
- ninkendo 2y agoAnd if you took each atom of all the humans alive and stacked them in a line (assuming 1 angstrom per atom and 7E17 atoms in a human), it would be roughly 60 light years long.
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- newprint 2y agoOne of the best things I have seen on HN. Thank you for the link and who ever build this !
- magicmicah85 2y agoI never knew that a minecraft world was bigger than Neptune. Very neat. What I find more interesting is when you get to the subatomic layer when it becomes apparent that it's all just theory and we have no idea what's actually here and we could be wrong but have no way of knowing...yet.
- throwcults 2y agoDeath cults would be shocked to know this
- hans_castorp 2y agoI also like this site to show the scale of the universe: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
- nthdesign 2y agoNeal Agarwal (Neal.Fun) did something similar a while back with cool WebGL effects. https://neal.fun/size-of-space/ https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
- hypertexthero 2y agoWarmly recommended version of the same thing in meditative video game form: Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(video_game)
- WhitneyLand 2y agoHas this been done with time rather than distance? I’ve always thought it could be a neat way to explore historical topics or quickly get a perspective on certain time periods.
- JamesHist 2y agohttps://www.historytimeline.com/timeline/universe/ https://www.historytimeline.com/timeline/universe/
- roamerz 2y agoThe gray stuff. Is that where the Level Designers haven't yet created the environment for us to play in? Seriously though as hard as the size of the universe is to comprehend, the gray stuff is exponentially more mysterious to me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- slowhadoken 2y agoI always want to see something like this but within the scope of the earth across time.
- niek_pas 2y agoIs the scrolling on mobile way too sensitive for anyone else?
- AnonC 2y agoNot only too sensitive, but it also seems to have a mind of its own. I gave up after trying to move around for a few seconds. I was already disappointed that it wouldn’t load without having to disable all tracker/analytics blocking.
- vivzkestrel 2y agoHow would you determine if the Universe is finite or infinite?
- rmbyrro 2y agoThis is all a simulation, folks. The "universe", not the website. I mean, the website is inside the simulation, so it's technically a simulation of the simulation it lives in...
- dhosek 2y agoSomething I recently posted on Bluesky in response to someone complaining about the exaggerated vertical scale of a relief map of the US: https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqfzyvoz5b2c https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqfzyvoz5... > It’s worth noting that the coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 3 miles above sea level, so in a 1000-pixel map, that would translate to a 1 pixel height for Mt Whitney! > So that difference in elevation is less than the diameter difference of the earth due to its rotation! A billiard ball has a diameter of 2in and the variation in the earth’s diameter scaled to that level would be 0.0066in which is smaller than a dust mite. > I should also point out that the diagrams that show the earth’s elliptical orbit are also a lie. Drawn correctly proportioned, the earth’s orbit is indistinguishable from a circle to the naked eye. (And don’t get me started on the pictures that overstate the size of sun & planets vs their orbits). > The universe is huge, we are tiny.
- nelblu 2y agoSimilar app from https://kurzgesagt.org/ https://kurzgesagt.org/ for phones: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt.app.Universe https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt... https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id1526364758 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263... What's interesting is that they both chose very similar music. Are they somehow related that I am unaware of?
- savageDude__ 2y agoLove the fact that the known universe is much more smaller (10^-35) than it is bigger (10^27) from our chosen baseline.
- jpeter 2y agohttps://htwins.net/scale2/ https://htwins.net/scale2/