27 Pictures That Will Make You Reevaluate Your Entire Existence

[MASTERBAKER]

27 Pictures That Will Make You Reevaluate Your Entire Existence
Existential crisis in 3...2...1...
Posted on November 25, 2019, at 4:22 p.m.

Dave Stopera
BuzzFeed Staff
View 132 comments

1. This is the Earth! This is where you live.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image / Via visibleearth.nasa.gov

2. And this is where you live in your neighborhood, the solar system.

foxnews.com
ADVERTISEMENT


3. Here's the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the moon. Doesn't look too far, does it?

Nickshanks / Via commons.wikimedia.org / reddit.com

4. THINK AGAIN. Inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, nice and neatly.

PerplexingPotato / Via reddit.com

5. But let's talk about planets. That little green smudge is North America on Jupiter.

NASA / John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk

6. And here's the size of Earth (well, six Earths) compared with Saturn:

NASA / John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk
ADVERTISEMENT


7. While I have you here, this is what Saturn's rings would look like if they were around Earth:

Ron Miller / Via io9.com

8. And just for good measure, remember lovable little Pluto? We know what it looks like now!

Twitter: @physicsforums

9. This right here is a comet. We landed a probe on one of those bad boys not too long ago. Here's what one looks like compared with Los Angeles:

Matt Wang / Via mentalfloss.com

10. But that's nothing compared to our sun. Just remember:

James McCarthy / Via reddit.com
ADVERTISEMENT


11. While we're at it, here's you from the moon:

NASA

12. Here's you from Mars:

NASA

13. Here's you from just behind Saturn's rings:

NASA

14. And here's you from just beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles away.

NASA
To paraphrase the big man Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have ever known exists on that little speck.

15. Let's step back a bit. Here's the size of Earth compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying, right?

John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk
The sun doesn't even fit in the image.
ADVERTISEMENT


16. And here's that same sun from the surface of Mars:

NASA

17. But that's nothing. Again, as Carl once mused, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth:

science.nationalgeographic.com

18. Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than our little puny sun. Just look at how tiny and insignificant our sun is compared to VY Canis Majoris, one of the biggest stars we know of:

en.wikipedia.org
Our sun probably gets its lunch money stolen.

19. Here's another look. The biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, is 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun:

youtube.com
.........
ADVERTISEMENT


20. But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact, if you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:

reddit.com

21. That's because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:

teecraze.com

22. But this is all you ever see:

Twitter: @lucybrockle
(That's not a picture of the Milky Way, but you get the idea.)

23. But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. Here's the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth:

Twitter: @smokeinpublic
Just THINK about all that could be inside there.
ADVERTISEMENT


24. But let's think bigger. There are thousands and thousands of galaxies in this picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, each containing millions of stars, each with their own planets.

hubblesite.org

25. Here's one of the galaxies pictured, UDF 423. This galaxy is 10 BILLION light years away. When you look at this picture, you are looking billions of years into the past.

wikisky.org
Some of the other galaxies are thought to have formed only a few hundred million years AFTER the Big Bang.

26. And just keep this in mind — that's a picture of a very small, small part of the universe. It's just an insignificant fraction of the night sky.

thetoc.gr

27. Let's talk black holes. I mean, we just saw what one looks like for the first time this past summer. Here's the size of a black hole compared with Earth's orbit, just to terrify you:

D. Benningfield/K. Gebhardt/StarDatei / Via mcdonaldobservatory.org
ADVERTISEMENT


So if you're ever feeling upset about your favorite show being canceled or the fact that they play Christmas music way too early — just remember...

This is your home.

By Andrew Z. Colvin (Own work) [http://CC-BY-SA-3.0 (creativecommons.org or GFDL (gnu.org], via Wikimedia Commons

This is what happens when you zoom out from your home to your solar system.

By Andrew Z. Colvin (Own work) [http://CC-BY-SA-3.0 (creativecommons.org or GFDL (gnu.org], via Wikimedia Commons

And this is what happens when you zoom out farther...

By Andrew Z. Colvin (Own work) [http://CC-BY-SA-3.0 (creativecommons.org or GFDL (gnu.org], via Wikimedia Commons

And farther...

Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikipedia Commons
ADVERTISEMENT


Keep going...

Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons

Just a little bit farther...

Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons

Almost there...

Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons

And here it is. Here's everything in the observable universe, and here's your place in it. Just a tiny little ant in a giant jar.

Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons
Oh man.

 

[Duece]

honestly I didn't know that comet was as big as LA

 

[Thrill3Seeker]

Hmmmm...not sure that I understand #25.

I thought that light years measure distance, rather than time.

 

[GOD MATERIAL]

ALL SPECULATION.

THERE IS NO WAY ANYBODY ON THIS PLANET CAN GET THE INFORMATION PICTURED ABOVE.

SIDE NOTE: I ALWAYS WONDERED HOW HUMANS HAD VERY CLOSE RENDITIONS OF WHAT THE CONTINENTS OF THE WORLD LOOKED LIKE BEFORE AIRPLANES AND SATELLITES.

 

[easy_b]

Neat

 

[World B Free]

ALL SPECULATION.

THERE IS NO WAY ANYBODY ON THIS PLANET CAN GET THE INFORMATION PICTURED ABOVE.

SIDE NOTE: I ALWAYS WONDERED HOW HUMANS HAD VERY CLOSE RENDITIONS OF WHAT THE CONTINENTS OF THE WORLD LOOKED LIKE BEFORE AIRPLANES AND SATELLITES.

I can tell you're a FLAT-EARTHER..., also

 

[doe moe]

 

[theart0f69]

I doubt quite a bit of this...like for instance I doubt that we have the technology to see as far away as they claim. I dont doubt that what they claim to see exists, rather how they are able to see it to know that it exists.

 

[GOD MATERIAL]

I can tell you're a FLAT-EARTHER..., also

YOU ARE WRONG IN YOUR ASSUMPTION,SIR.

 

[blackbull1970]

Here is a interesting short vid on Time and Space.

 

[MASTERBAKER]

 

[doug777]

Hmmmm...not sure that I understand #25.

I thought that light years measure distance, rather than time.

Because of the vast distance, the light you see from that galaxy takes billions of years to reach us. For instance, let's say that sound moves at the speed of light and there was an explosion on the sun that's loud enough to be heard on earth, because the sun is 93 million miles away it would take over 8 minutes for the sound to reach earth, so we would be hearing something that happened 8 minutes ago.

 

[thismybgolname]

That asteroid is huge.

Something that size would wipe out life on our planet.

 

[swoop1]

In High School my teacher told me the galaxy doesn’t end. Got to be something else alive out there.

 

[ORIGINAL NATION]

They have it in books that at one time the pyramids had a coating on them that made them sparkle like the stars in the sky. They claimed an earthquake shook the coating off. Does not seem likely when there have been evidence of explosives in, on and around the pyramids.
Who was the first person to step foot on the moon? Who were the first people on Earth?

 

[ATLKingpin]

Dope

 

[scullydog]

No conspiracist, i'm a realist. Logically, if you look at it, they have been going interstellar since Roswell. Maybe earlier. So, they know what is going on. We are connect to the universe, most of us are not aware of it.

 

[gene cisco]

Crazy that they went that distance to the moon and back 50 fucking years ago.

My mind is blown by thinking back about some of the tech from the 80s until now. Imagine being a kid in the early 30s and living to see the fucking moon trip.

 

[Eli_Porter]

Hmmmm...not sure that I understand #25.

I thought that light years measure distance, rather than time.

For nearby objects we can use something like parallax. Hold your thumb out at arm's length close one eye and look at it. Then switch to the other eye. Notice how your thumb moves with respect to the background? That's an example of parallax. Because space is vast and the largest baseline (how far apart your eyes are) we could get is usually with the earth on one side of it's orbit 6 months apart, this method isn't very good for objects very very far away.

Going a bit further out we've observed that there are some types of stars that oscillate in their brightness over time. Careful study revealed these are essentially stars at a characteristic point near the end of their life, and that there's a very strong relationship between their luminosity and period of pulsation. These are called "Cepheid variable stars". Thus we can watch how often they pulsate, know how luminous they should be, compare to how bright it looks to us and figure out how far it must be to appear as dim as it does.

 

[Keepthapeace]

This shit still trips me out seeing this a while ago

 

[veritech]

Hmmmm...not sure that I understand #25.

I thought that light years measure distance, rather than time.

It measures both. A light year is the distance light travels in a year.

 

[cashwhisperer]

Y'all niggas.....

 

[Camille]

No dome???

 

[BrownTurd]

Hmmmm...not sure that I understand #25.

I thought that light years measure distance, rather than time.

Since the light takes 10 billion years to get to us. What you are seeing is in the past

 

[MASTERBAKER]

No dome???

?

 

[junyloko]

FUCK NASA!

 

[Camille]

?

We have a few folks who thing the earth is flat and under a dome. I was being sarcastic.


:mumbles: if you have to explain it it's not funny...

 

[3rd__Optic]

^^^

 

[Rembrandt Brown]

5. But let's talk about planets. That little green smudge is North America on Jupiter.

NASA / John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk

North America on Mars

(John Brady/Astronomy Central)

Some other things in the solar system are on the smaller side. Brady also created this image of North America on Mars, which gives you a sense of how we might feel a little cramped if we tried to move everything on Earth to a colony on the Red Planet. Mars is only about half as wide as Earth is. And its smaller mass means that it produces less gravity, so everything weighs less there. And why is it red? Because of iron oxide in its sands.

USA on the moon

(boredboarder8 via reddit)

Meanwhile, Reddit user boredboarder8 created this overlay of the continental US on the moon. The moon has a diameter about 40 percent that of Earth, and you can just about wrap the US on one side.

The moon is actually a pretty impressive size considering that it was most likely created from a collision between Earth and another heavenly body about 4.5 billion years ago. That is one big hunk of junk. And like Mars, the moon's lesser mass means less gravity than Earth. That's why astronauts can bounce around on its surface.

Nothing is anything compared to the Sun

(The International Astronomical Union / Martin Kornmesser)

On the left, the edge of the Sun, the star at the center of our solar system. And then note the tiny Earth, third planet from the Sun. Our Sun isn't nearly as large as stars can get, though. It's a medium-sized star, classified as a yellow dwarf. For example, supergiant stars such as Betelgeuse (which you can see in the constellation Orion) can be a thousand times bigger than our Sun. There are some really huge things out there.

This is what North America would look like on Jupiter

Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help shape it. In text, video and audio, our reporters explain politics, policy, world affairs, technology, culture, science, the climate crisis, money...

www.vox.com

 

[Rembrandt Brown]

North America on Mars

(John Brady/Astronomy Central)

Some other things in the solar system are on the smaller side. Brady also created this image of North America on Mars, which gives you a sense of how we might feel a little cramped if we tried to move everything on Earth to a colony on the Red Planet. Mars is only about half as wide as Earth is. And its smaller mass means that it produces less gravity, so everything weighs less there. And why is it red? Because of iron oxide in its sands.

USA on the moon

(boredboarder8 via reddit)

Meanwhile, Reddit user boredboarder8 created this overlay of the continental US on the moon. The moon has a diameter about 40 percent that of Earth, and you can just about wrap the US on one side.

The moon is actually a pretty impressive size considering that it was most likely created from a collision between Earth and another heavenly body about 4.5 billion years ago. That is one big hunk of junk. And like Mars, the moon's lesser mass means less gravity than Earth. That's why astronauts can bounce around on its surface.

Nothing is anything compared to the Sun

(The International Astronomical Union / Martin Kornmesser)

On the left, the edge of the Sun, the star at the center of our solar system. And then note the tiny Earth, third planet from the Sun. Our Sun isn't nearly as large as stars can get, though. It's a medium-sized star, classified as a yellow dwarf. For example, supergiant stars such as Betelgeuse (which you can see in the constellation Orion) can be a thousand times bigger than our Sun. There are some really huge things out there.

This is what North America would look like on Jupiter

Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help shape it. In text, video and audio, our reporters explain politics, policy, world affairs, technology, culture, science, the climate crisis, money...

www.vox.com

Ugh, I tried. The pictures come up for me when I quote the post.