See The Scale Of The Universe: Prepare To Be Blown Away

I love learning, and I’m positively thrilled whenever I get the chance to gather new information (I’m strange like that). That’s why I find the application I’m sharing with you today so fascinating – it’s essentially an interactive encyclopedia. Sort of. Let’s back up a bit. We’ve always been told how irreducibly complex existence is. For as long as modern society has existed, there have been scientists pondering the size and scope of the known universe. They’re not all that difficult to ignore, are they? It’s so incredibly easy – so criminally simple – for us to get caught up in our day to day lives, our daily struggles and standoffs, and to completely forget just how incredible our universe really is.

For whatever reason, we just don’t think about it. It never really occurs to us. Maybe we just don’t want to think about how incredibly significant our planet really is in the grand scheme of things. Two independent application developers known only as the Huang Twins (Michael and Carey Huang) have released a nifty little flash app known as “The Scale of the Universe 2012,” which is a sequel to the original application of the same name.

When you first open up the app, you’re confronted with an image of Earth, with a human-sized scale. If you zoom in or out, it’ll show you a wide array of objects, arranged according to their relative size. Clicking on an object will give you a small blurb with a bit of information about what it is, including its exact measurements in meters. You can either zoom in all the way down to the smallest atomic unit of measurement or zoom out to the scale of the entire universe. It’s a bit of a sobering experience either way. On one hand, you’re confronted with the concept of how incredibly complex matter and existence is, and on the other…the true scale of our insignificance when compared to the size of the galaxy.

Honestly, the latter one’s actually a bit terrifying. Swing by the Huang Twins’ website here.