Let's Find Out - Size, Distance, and Time in the Universe | ASMR (3.5 Hours)

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

These podcasts are just the audio from my Youtube videos. If you'd like to see visuals too, visit my channel, Let's Find Out: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7FOVZ1xTzKav7TVTATIcxQ Tonight we explore the often misrepresented concepts of size, distance, and even time on cosmological scales. Thanks to all my generous supporters (across Patreon, Paypal, Venmo, the Tingles app, and amazing gifts to the PO Box) who have helped the channel (even since I've been on a looooooooooong hiatus). It's been a bit chaotic, but we've found a rhythm, and I hope to be uploading more frequently (lol, i know). "A very popular error- having the courage of one's own convictions; rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's own convictions" - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:56 parallax and distance to the Moon 30:36 distance to Alpha Centauri if Earth was a marble 32:10 how the Sun's light rays are parallel 45:35 often-misrepresented aspects of existence (importance of proper scales) 54:56 "To Scale: The Solar System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg 1:03:30 linking psychology and astronomy: the social environment shaped our ancestor's cognition (and so ours, too) perhaps more than the physical environment 1:10:24 deeper dive into commonly distorted aspects of existence (history, progress, time, data, society, technology) 1:26:49 million vs billion: better understanding the universe across orders of magnitude (perspectives along exponential/logarithmic scales and rates of change) 1:37:00 recipe for making the solar system to scale 1:40:01 behind the scenes 1:42:36 pyramids to andromeda: my desk pictures as examples of orders of magnitudes across space 1:49:42 million vs billion part 2 1:57:04 parallax and distance to the Moon part 2 https://medium.com/@DeeAlexandria/how-to-measure-the-distance-to-the-moon-a1e502440918 2:02:11 the slow and very impressive accumulation of knowledge, the astronomy book https://amzn.to/3ksfr56 2:08:09 an example of why misrepresentation confuses me (parallax) 2:11:34 beginning our solar system 2:31:21 taking our measurements of the planets 2:37:29 assembling our mr pencil compass (not sponsored) https://amzn.to/3rmH80r 2:46:04 drawing the inner solar system to scale 3:04:56 our baseball-field model of the inner solar system m 3:06:03 an overtired baby giving grandma a hard time 3:06:51 comparing Earth, Mars and the Sun's mass and diameters 3:12:40 completing the solar system model (on my desk and on the baseball field) ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►Support for the channel... ▸Shop on Amazon here (kick-backs at no cost to you): https://amzn.to/2LnNXd6 ▸PayPal ......... https://www.paypal.me/LetsFindOutASMR ......... [e-mail] ▸Patreon ........ https://www.patreon.com/LetsFindOutASMR ▸📩 Wishlist (for the channel): http://a.co/9vUJ8eF ▸📪 If you'd like to mail me something: Let's Find Out ASMR (Rich) P.O. Box 1582 Palm City, FL 34991 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►socials... ▸📧 Discord.................https://discord.com/invite/PyUfaN7 (* I'm not very active here yet) ▸📧 Email................... [e-mail] ▸📧 Instagram........... https://www.instagram.com/lets_find_out_asmr/. @lets_find_out_asmr ▸📧 Twitter................. https://twitter.com/letsfindoutasmr @LetsFindOutasmr

Think about this. We are the culmination of 14 billion years of an unbroken cosmic evolution. And if this is true, it means that we are the universe trying to understand itself. Are time and space even possible to imagine on this scale? This is rich and welcome to Let's Find Out. Tonight we're going to be exploring the concept of scale. in the universe. And we're going to be doing it by looking at our solar system.

And not just the sizes of the planets and the sun, but the truly colossal distances between them. And we're taking a long journey this evening. So grab a snack or a drink, or just relax and get comfortable. And hopefully next time you're outside, looking at the stars at night, you'll be able to better recognize

that what you're actually seeing is suns, hundreds, maybe even thousands of light years away. And maybe this will help us have a slightly deeper sense of and appreciation for just how vast this beautiful existence really is. The other day I was trying to sketch out the, a slightly more accurate representation of the Earth-Moon system and particularly in regards to using parallax to determine the distance to the moon using trigonometry.

Essentially you just draw a right triangle and you figure out the angles inside it which gives you the side lengths. The concept of parallax though is so often misrepresented mostly just in terms of scale. I mean just like any popularizations of space, astronomy topics, whether it's on the history channel or discovery channel, whatever, or even other

YouTube channels. So I was drawing it out just because I personally didn't understand it. I was in all absolutely, I was really just impressed by how the heck we can know the distance to the moon just by looking at it, using some mathematics. And basic math at that, not even very, you know, we're not. getting into calculus and quantum mechanics there relatively basic mathematics just using a right triangle it's so often misrepresented so if we have earth there no just a very simple image of a you know constellation representation

of distant distant stars concept of pair you observe the moon I guess we'll go in position on earth you travel a distance away another position has changed something much more distant than the moon to measure the change in position against the fundamental concept is that so from this position right here the moon against the sky would look like this and then from this position over here at the exact same moment mind you so you'd have to synchronize with someone else you know say this This is Paris, France, right here, and this is Greece.

Athens, Greece, maybe. The moon over here in Greece would look like it's right here. And the concept of parallax, the fundamental concept, is that these stars have to be so far away as to practically be considered infinitely far away. And by doing that, what that allows us to assume is that the light rays from the stars hitting the earth are essentially parallel and what that allows us to do is the concept the mathematical concept of two parallel lines being transversed i should have drew them a little bit further apart but the uh transversal of two parallel lines two lines that are equidistant apart

along the infinite length of them. Two lines that will never meet. As one math site joked, I got a kick out of parallel lines. Have so much in common. It's a shame they'll never meet. It's a shame they'll never meet. A transverse of two parallel lines.

So this, for our case of parallax, would be the rays of light coming from the same star, hitting the earth and it's so far away that the rays are considered parallel even from both of these positions and the transverse means that allows us to determine our little triangle and the whole point is here it's to make a right triangle so that we can figure out one of these legs and that would be the distance from the earth to the moon look at these stars from the first position We want to draw a line like we did right past the moon. So there's a reference point, and that'll be, let's say, this star right here.

That star right there, use that as a standard, or our static background, essentially, against which the apparent position of the moon has changed. So when we look at it, the moon from this point on the earth, right now, remember Greece, a light ray are essentially parallel from the stars. And if we look at the moon from Athens, our second position, we need to observe and recognize how much it has changed position relative to our reference star. And this changed in position here, think of it as right here,

is what we measure allows us through the principle of alternate interior angles created by a transversal of two parallel lines. It's a fundamental geometric concept. Once we know this angle, this angle we know is the same because any line can be considered, if cut in two, its component angles always add up to 180. And then on the other side, it makes a full circle. So this is 180 and this is the other 180. And with parallel lines, if we know that these lines are exactly essentially at the same angle relative

to the transversal because these two lines are equidistant at all points, then if we know this angle, we also know that interior, angle of the other parallel line will be sliced at the same angle as this one was. So these angles are the same as these acute angles are the same as these obtuse angles. In other words, gives us this angle here. And so the principle, this right here is dangerous part of this example. It's confusing, it's A because I'm probably a bad teacher, but B,

because the concept of scale do a better job on this piece of paper I can use the total length maybe you can go diagonal and get as much out of the paper as possible but still this fall star in this system here the earth moon and a distant star system is so distant relative to the distance between the earth and moon that it's literally unfathomable we we it's unimaginable how far away just by some of the little background research I've been doing roughly if this was even the nearest star to us Proxima Centauri and this was an accurate scale you know on this scale of the earth and moon and this isn't still this star would be you know if in other

words the distance between the Earth and the Moon was roughly oh I don't know we so have happen to have a little. I'll just say an inch and a quarter. This star proximate centauri would be, I want to say miles away, on the order of miles away, just to give a rough idea. And that's the whole point is that these rays are parallel for this, the concept of parallaxed work. And they are, practically speaking, they're parallel enough that we have. actually get an accurate distance, what distance we've, you know, since replicated and verified many, many times since Renaissance telescopes and quadrants. And so that is essentially the concept there. And it's once we know this angle, we know to a fair

precision the distance between France and Athens so we know this base side of the triangle and then these two sides right here go right triangle if we happen to measure the moon directly overhead we can do a little math and we can account for the curvature of the earth so you know on a on a closer scale the curvature is going to prevent that baseline from actually being a straight line. We can account for the curvature of the earth, which we've known since ancient Greece. Aristarchus or Eratosthenes.

Figured out the curvature of the earth roughly to a great degree of accuracy. Actually, you can figure out that we can orient it and situate the experiment so that the two cities and the moon can oriented so that the experiment allows that right triangle to be created and honestly even if not it's not really the biggest hang up on this example because there's also trigonometric identities and laws and principles like the law of cosines and signs that you know with which you can determine angles and side lengths of triangles even if they aren't right triangles I believe by splitting them into right triangles so if you have if this is our angle we know this side right

here this would be the opposite side from this angle you know tangent might be a good trigonometric identity to apply here. So tangent is the opposite, the adjacent. So the tangent of any particular angle is always a ratio. If we take the tangent of this angle, it's going to always give us the same exact ratio of the opposite side over the adjacent side. Right here, and this would be the adjacent. So if the distance to the moon from France is our X or our or our adjacent side, we'll figure that out right here by essentially saying the adjacent side is going to equal, by doing some quick math,

manipulation of the equation here, multiply both sides by adjacent, divide both sides by tangent, the opposite is going to measuring, observing using very basic hundreds of years old technology to measure things and angles in the sky you get that angle and by two parallel lines you get this angle and we perform the tangent of that angle to get a number want to be this and so although we might not know these individual numbers we know the ratio of them because in any right triangle the of specific angles are always going to be the same. They're in tables, you can look them up, tangent of 10 degrees is always going to be the same number. And that is just a ratio of the two numbers. So whether this side is five inches or five miles or 500,000 miles, more accurately in the case of the moon, it's about twice as far as the moon actually is.

we it's just so fascinating that we can use these thousands of year old concepts essentially these concepts that were perhaps

invented by the Egyptians or continued from even older traditions by the Egyptians and by the Greeks and passed on to the Arabs and the

Islamic Middle Ages and passed on back to or through that route from Greece to Renaissance Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance ages. It's just fascinating that this very, very old mathematical knowledge can be practically put to use and to determine the distance of our moon, how far away it is. If that is the side that we want to know is x. I guess we don't really care about this side.

We just wanted the angle we can get. It's just a general identity over adjacent. There's a little so catoa is one. Taua being tangent is the opposite over adjacent. So tangent is the opposite of this angle over the adjacent. It's going to be B over A, opposite over adjacent, or sorry, B over X. sorry, B over X in our little use of our variables here. It's our opposite B, our baseline, and we know that because we measured it.

The distance in our little example here from Paris, France to Athens, is always the same. The value of tangent of whatever the angle is between the moon has created, and it's apparent position change. If we look at it relative to this star and how it's moved, whatever that angle that it's in the sky is what we plug in here and that gives us the distance which is I think roughly on average because the moon does have an elliptical 230 to 200 full is great you know it's fascinating that I just

wanted to flesh that out real quick so that we you understand the basic concept behind being able to use you figured out get into how you figure that out and the baseline which you can imagine we figure it out that's fairly simple mathematics to account for a curvature of the earth and we can draw a straight line there so we can know these numbers we can know that angle in that baseline and as long as we know that we have a right triangle or as long as we have a triangle who who side length down here we can at least know we can apply you know again law of cosines or signs

different trick and metric identities if it's not exactly a right triangle we can break it up into manageable right triangles and figure it out with just a couple extra steps then we laid out here we can figure out the distance to the moon and that's fascinating to me it's absolutely remarkable it's it's a a statement about the ingenuity of the human mind and the intellect and the fact that we've you know since been able to develop radars and lasers and bounce them off the moon to figure out that it takes one point two seconds for light to travel there and then another one point two or whatever to travel back and we can you know based on the speed of light measure how far that must have been based on how long it took the light to get there at that speed is of course a whole other ball of wax on the impressive achievements of human kind.

But if we were to more accurately, that's not burn this, but if we were to more accurately make a sketch like I did here, it'll make nice sounds. And so if we elongate this, again, it's not going to be anywhere near. the Earth scale, but if we make our Earth a little bit smaller and our moon and the star that we're referencing a little bit further away on this piece of paper, we might just be able to get a slightly better celestial bodies, objects in the universe like planets and stars. How these objects in their distances allow us to make these. assumptions like rays coming from the stars and actually the sun as I'm going to talk about

in just a second. I want to be parallel because they're so far away. Rays of lighter clearly not parallel. They're coming from the star completely nullifies our entire argument about finding that angle and having alternate interior angles equalling each other based on the transatlified. reversal of two parallel lines and that's always the part I got most hung up on. It's a slightly more accurate dependent to do. So if we make our two points between Paris, France, it's Greece, I got in trouble for the one video. Was one like that and one like that. I just do it. If we say roughly the earth to moon is three quarters of an inch distant and proximate centauri would still be a mile away let's say

no actually i know for a fact if the earth was this size roughly the size of a marble the nearest star would be i think at least 30 maybe 3 000 miles away at least something like that if if not 30 000 miles away. So this here is about 12 inches away, or maybe 10 we'll say. So it's about 10 inches away our hypothetical distant. And this is mind you the four light year away roughly closest star to the earth. Most stars are thousands, hundreds of thousands of times further away in just our galaxy alone than Proxima Centauri. So the more accurate distance, imagine this being even a while all the way, but really it's more like 3,000 to 30,000. Imagine how small this angle would be.

Nometry in our little example here, more accurate. I used to think, because the example I was saying was even if the earth was here in this example, you could still seem like there was an angle because the sun being a spherical object like all celestial

bodies generally are it's even at the closest let's see even at the closest angles of the sun is like this and you zoom in the misconception I had

is that it given that the sun is a sphere, as it emits photons. Each photon is going to be admitted, I guess, in exactly a 90-degree angle or orthogonal to the surface of the sun from which it emitted. And that's actually not true. The real, the reality of the situation is that photons are emitted in essentially random directions,

beams of light, no matter where they emanate from. So this same spot, you know, over time, even though multiple photons emit from roughly that same spot, even if we zoom in to a microscopic level on, you know, 20 atoms across, directions of light, depending on, you know, of course, the sun being a dynamic, essentially static, not static, a, a series of billions of nuclear explosions being held at bay and contained within roughly the same volume in space by its own gravity. We'll put it that way. So the directions of light of the photons are essentially emitted at random based on whatever particular collision path they took nuclear explosions at the core to the bubbling surface of the corona from which they're emitted.

And it's all random. So anyways, if you compile these up, you're just going to have a close-up direction among all the photons. We zoom out to, you know, a quarter or half the sun, it's still going to be, you know, very, very, very random. Do the ones orthogonal to the sun, but you also got to do ones almost tangiatic. to the sun and then every angle in between so it's just chaotic emanating light from every part of it in every direction from it but what we realize is that as we get further and further away from the sun until even to us it's the size of our thumbnail held at arm's length as it is from here on earth 92 million miles away it becomes

so far away, you know what, we'll make it more. It comes so far away that even though each, even the smallest section of sun is emitting photons at random, we're so far away that the light hitting us from the sun must necessarily have emanated from the sun towards our direction. And that is such a small portion of the sun. I think the biggest takeaway is that it's hard to understand, given that so much light, we can step outside on a sunny day and just feel the warmth of the photons interacting with our skin.

We feel the warmth and the radiation of the heat and the energy it brings with it. But to give you an idea of how much actual energy I'll put the sun, is emitting, we receiving direction of the sun is emitting this much the same amount, we're only receiving the tiniest little fractions, almost imperceptibly small, of the sun's total energy output. And that is necessarily limiting the photons we receive to the photons that no matter where they emanated from on the sun, they just happen. to hit the nature, I guess what I'm getting at it.

It's by the nature of the sheer distance away from the sun. Our sheer distance away from the sun that allows us to define the light rays that we receive, and that's not to even mention the stars, and how much, how many hundreds of thousands of times, If not millions and billions. No, actually, yeah, billions of times further. How many billions and trillions of times further the stars are than the sun? That's not to even mention that.

We're receiving such a small, infinitely infinitesimal fraction of the sun's light as we get further. I guess you have to emphasize my example here. Each of these little diagrams progressively zooming further and further out from the sun These are the farthest possible distances That the on the sun from which between the the photons That also happened to hit the earth and it resumed further and further out essentially we're pulling the earth in these examples

further and further away because if we're this zoomed into the sun the earth must be really close to be right here so in each one successive little you know diagram here the earth is further and further away how much other radiation is emitting in the space and never even being captured by our planet let alone the other planets or other stars even you know me that's that's how we see galaxies is by the starlight that's left over that has made it out after it's been absorbed by all the gas and different stars and planets within that galaxy and so all we're seeing is the light that and there's plenty of it because it's emitted in all directions very

intensely all the time for billions and billions That little sliver of the sun's light is actually reaching us. For all intents and purposes, parallel, non-existent, a trillions of a degree, whatever you want to call it. We can probably measure it much more accurately and actually find it. I haven't been able to find it, though. I didn't look too hard, but it wasn't readily available information. Most all websites just agree that.

even for any scientific experiments you essentially consider the sun's light rays as being parallel to each other. That degree is so small. That gives you an idea of how far away we are relative to our sun, let alone how far we are away. This distance represents thousands of miles, even on these scales right here from stars. And that's what I want to continue to address with our small little scale of the planets, and put those in proportion and discuss some of the other examples of,

and the perspective that it lends us to really think about just how far and consider how far and how small we are and how far apart we are from other planets and stars, let alone galaxies, like not to even mention galaxies. But here right here, if we consider this, so if we look at one spot right there, move our position over, we can see if we hold the moon, the red little envelope opener, we hold that stationary, and we change our position. with these candle stars in the background. We notice that if we consider they're far enough away where they won't change,

they'll be in the same position because relative to how far away they are, a small shift on Earth is inconsequential. It is close enough to change its apparent position in the sky. The reality of true enormity of scale, of the universe and specifically the solar system but we'll talk about some other concepts I've ran across too as well dealing with numbers and size and time distance that's to say the units that you have to characterize space with are so large that you you cannot visualize them on simple confined human-sized pieces

of paper. And astronomically speaking, geologically speaking, and our size are so finite and small that it's really worth doing a simple exercise to understand our scale and the true perspective that would show us, show us our actual, you know, places, our positions or status, at least along those dimensions in the universe. And I don't think those are the primary dimensions or at least not yeah at least not the primary dimensions they're certainly significant but the complexity of our brains and our neural circuitries having hundreds of billions of interconnected neurons are of course the note like I always mentioned it's actually worth noting every time I just

mentioned it a lot they're the most complex natural things that we know of in the universe, our brains, let alone the interconnection of multiple brains, of multiple humans communicating, that is, societies, or even tribes. Those networks are the most complex things we know about. You can think of distance, you can think of, sorry, you have space, of which, of which distance and size are a component, and then time, of course, of course time mysterious concept of time that just static about the entire universe now we know that it's all relative and time is very distorted and this tension with matter mass

and distance and light time space are in fact a I guess a unified thing whatever that means but really just fascinated distorted you try to draw something a little more accurate and you realize this and right here wildly distorted wildly like not even close not at all so for the next 45 minutes I guess I want to try to counterbalance the very very very typical distortion of at least the solar system we're just going to start with the solar system

because I don't think there's enough scientists, astronomers that really do it justice because well I think it's important to recognize and be exposed and learn properly accurate information and recognize our

true position, at least in space and time, in the universe. It's such an amazing thing to think about. The reason it gives us pause and strikes us with awe to really, really fathom our size and not just the size, but almost more importantly, the distance, the massive distances between the astronomical objects. I mean, really when you think about it, you can't even fathom the average human mind. That doesn't actually regularly consider the true size and scale of, you know, larger things

on Earth and distances between cities, let alone Earth to Moon and the distances between the planets and even interstellar distances. The reason it strikes us with all is because it's us, I guess confronting an unknown it's us peering into the abyss and seeing that there are things so enormous

and so distant things that we take for granted you look up and our lives are determined our circadian rhythms are biolidia is set by the sun in the rotation of the earth and every time the earth

rotates such that the sun rays beam upon us again every morning, every day our biology's reset, our circadian rhythms are reset and we take for granted that this object

is this long the size of our thumbnail held at arm's length is this large and this is us right here this little guy right there we're oh what is earth I don't know you know the sun is I just looked it up it's 1.4 million kilometers miles across radius six yeah so the earth is not even 13,000

kilometers across diameter and then the sun is 1.4 million 1.4 million So it looks even bigger than that in this picture, but it's so massive that we really can't comprehend it. You know, when you think about really just the distance of a mile or two, the brain starts to lose its ability to accurately actually think about and consider how far that would be to do a human action. You know, man is the measure of all things, as Aristotle said. blissfully ignorantly go about our day so many of us I mean not all of us but I certainly do have and and do a scary amount just takes so much for granted including

our small scale our small size in proportion to the quite literally unimaginable distances I want to just well first I want to one actually when I was thinking about just you know doing this video real quick I forgot I didn't I didn't consciously remember that I had seen this but once I started you know doing some real basic research remember I saw this video it's a beautifully done video I want to show you this guy does yeah so if you don't want to you know if you're not trying to just zone out and watch much much my very very glacial representation and presentation of this watch this video at seven minutes

and it's a beautiful representation of perspective really just this part here that uh let's see where yeah he shows like this is normally right here is what we are generally shown like is what we are generally shown like most times most all times in fact I feel like most people have not unless you actively search for an accurate depiction of the earth to moon, which is literally what I had to do for here. You see the earth. It's actually unimaginable how far the moon is. Again, it looks, you know, we have no judge of distance.

By looking at the moon, we don't know its size, we don't know its distance, by looking at it without using very clever tricks. and innovative ideas like parallax to be able to and it's you know the conjunction of parallax and trichonometry and doing a little bit of math and a lot of traveling um to to figure out the true distance and look what he does here i love i love this such a genius representation Look at that. That's actually the distance. You know, it's obviously just an approximation, but that's much more accurate than what he had previously there. And so, yeah, I guess in my subconscious, my unconscious, I was, I've been wanting to kind of just do a little video,

just, you know, talking. Yeah, using the earth, that same earth, he goes out to the desert and recognizes, and you know, he does the math and realizes that he needs a, to accurately portray and present the not only sizes, distances between miles, he said, you know, to get the full orbits. So when you think of a distance between the sun and a planet, that's half its orbit, you know. So to get twice that, which would be the full ellipse, you know, roughly a circle of the orbit. you would need twice that distance. So at that scale where the Earth is roughly a marble, you need, I think, for this planet out, Neptune is 2 miles from the sun,

which is like a 4-mile orbit. Let's see. There's a visual, there's a great little visualization. 1,000 feet from the sun to Mars. I'll just show you what the sun would look like if the Earth was a marble. So anyways, it's on the desert and successfully plan them up for a display and then does a time lapse capture from a distant mountain where he drives with his actual truck and a light attached, you know, neon light attached to the back of the truck. Here we go. Okay.

It's his car driving and he zooms out. You can see it's a two mile direct shot from Neptune to the sun to his scaled model. No, sorry, three and a half mile. Because he said he needed seven miles, I think. Anyways, this is like a tent. That's a car. It's a whole vehicle.

And remember, the sun to Mercury, Mercury to Venus and Venus to Earth, roughly, you know, very roughly speaking, they're about the same distances between the same distances apart. The Earth is the size of a marble, which means Venus is about the same size. It's 500.

At that scale, it's 500 to 50. feet away. It's 500 feet away from the sun. So I mean roughly that's about here. That's about what we have and the earth would need 600 feet to draw an accurate diagram of the earth to the sun right here. Six or seven houses down to my desk I guess which is let's see the field of vision. It's about four of these distances right. right here so many people jump to the idea that it's terrifying to think about these distances and you know our small space place in space in the universe how small and exposed we really are but i think that actually um i wrote it wrote down here i think it really taps into our

social instincts i mean we're fundamentally we didn't evolve from her herd animals like horses but we we certainly involved in groups. Well, yeah, it was Jordan Peterson that brought this to my attention, that the environment thought of as a social environment, then the physical, the actual literal physical environment of, you know, whether it's forests and trees, surrounded by, you know, tree snakes and lions, that might have, you know, predators that might have eaten us, and the savannas and all that,

those environments are almost secondary to our perception, our evolved way of looking at the world. We actually evolved in a social environment. And what I'm getting at is that recognizing that the earth is such a small, priceless, small, fragile, paradisal, blip oasis in the desert the vast cold relentlessly

hostile depths of space that actually to me that activates that incites that that inspires us to remember our

most instinctual I guess perspectives of life is that we're social animals and we are fundamentally part of a group that's become so large, so dispersed, that it's hard to remember that we are a part of it, and it's the human species, and we're the same way that we get that feeling of camaraderie and that very warm of the safe feeling of being harbored from anxiety

by grouping with someone ideologically against another ideology, we can on a grander scale remind ourselves by looking at our true place in the cosmos that we are on this oasis together. And we can group ourselves in with all of the human race. And on an even broader scale, the entire animal kingdom, you know, that we share the earth with and it's really a beautiful thing i i think that's the biggest i think that's the largest uh i think that's the most profound perspective you can have is to recognize

that your your life is larger than you weren't created just by a single phenomenon of your your parents procreating, you're just one link in a chain of hundreds and thousands and millions of generations of animals that eventually became humans procreating successfully, mind you, and living long enough at least to procreate again and create a new generation, and you're the current link, you're the current last most recent link unless you've had kids and in which they're the current link and successor to this four billion successfully procreated in the what ultimately became social environment that you know apes the monkeys and eventually the greater apes of which were a part of um that we evolved in so the social group

is so burrowed and so and so unnoticeably saturated it's so unnoticeably saturates it's so deeply thoroughly saturates our perspective and perceptions of everything we do

that we don't even notice it it's part of the beauty of looking at psychology and astronomy and trying to find a link between the two is because I love understanding more about myself and trying to figure out what it is that makes me so not terrified but in awe and like a have a sense of reverence you know it's like this

weird fusion between a spiritual religious experience in a raw scientific rational exposure to facts about the universe that it blends and it kind of meets they kind of overlap territory there when you look at the cosmos in our true perspective and our true place in it yeah i think fundamentally i wrote that our uh the scale that i want to convey that i will eventually get to in just a minute i think that uh what it boils down to is that it gives us a perspective so grand and so large that the similarities of our circumstance outweigh our differences

that's really what I wanted to get at things briefly that I wanted to point to when we're talking about scale and perception and things that we encounter that we probably have a skewed distorted perspective about just much like this picture here

and the distorted angle of the rays of light actually, you know, coming to us that looks accurate. It's like, oh yeah, the Earth is so small there. That must be about the distance between the Earth and the Moon. No, it's, uh, the moon would more likely the size of the United States, roughly, from New York, the East Coast to the West Coast, you know. Maybe even further. It might even be out to about here, actually.

I want to, I want to just draw the sun. we're gonna find roughly a good size I think I'm gonna have to draw the earth roughly about that big is the size of because if the earth was this big it would be unmanageable for our purposes here and if it was the size of a peppercorn it would be a lot more manageable I think I would be able to maybe tape I'll be able to tape two pages together and we can actually use. I just really want to emphasize how often we go

through life without recognizing the true scale of things. And the true, and it works on, again, like with data, information, it works with time. It works with population size. And things like, these were actually really interesting to me.

This guy, John F. Miller, 86, says 78% of Americans don't even use Twitter. So that means 22% of Americans do. 10% of all tweeters create 80% of tweets. That's something called a Pareto principal, a Matthew principal, a Price's Law, where a small, generally a, you can generalize it as a square root of the number of people in a system. do half the work roughly

and so 10% of tweeters create 80% of all of all tweets so you gotta remember that there's a perhaps fruitlessly industrious I don't know is that an oxymoram at least busy

bunch of people small subset of use And I'm pretty sure this applies to all social media and all social institutions. The small, loud group who are feverishly working away at their little, you know, pet projects are the ones who often make the most noise. And I said, so that was 2% of Americans create almost 80% of tweets, less than two. It's very, very, very generalizing here, but, you know, roughly that's what that means. is that um

and I got that because 22% of Americans use Twitter if 78% don't and then 10% of those people and I know it's just talking about

globally here so um you know maybe we can generalize that 78% and say roughly 80% of people in any given country don't use Twitter and I know that would be very uh unscientific

of me to just make generalizations like that But, you know, we're just trying to talk about scale here. I just like the perspective. 2%. It can create almost 80%. 2% of the maybe global population. It's important because we don't act like that. You know, we don't act like we're just hearing from 2 out of every 100 people.

And then even further, what, narrowing the... data points shows the actual users of Twitter. I'd say about roughly, we could say about 70% of all users lie between that 15-year-old range. So that most of the people you're hearing from. So of that 2% of Americans, 2% of the population, you know, online that are creating 80% probably, you know, 80% of those.

Again, that law, it's weird how it applies across all scales. 80% of those are probably people between 15 and 25 years of age. Okay, this is historic, is a time perspective on time. It's probably one of the more common references to scale across time, but that's because it's so impactful that it's only 66 years between 1900, 1905 and 19, what was it, 69?

So 1904, 1969, something like that, that the Wright brothers flew through first extended, prolonged, I don't know, was it more than a minute or 30 seconds or something like that flight at kiddie hawk north carolina and americans landed a man on the moon a human being went from flying mastering air you know lighter than air flight or not lighter than air than air uh mastering the technology to create enough lift to sustain flight off the ground I guess flight is off the ground in 66 years less than 70 years they flew to the moon and let me remind you the distance to the moon where is it right here this is the distance which is most often depicted and that's what this the other guy from to scale he did at the beginning of his video but I don't want to just record his whole video but yeah look at this

all of these images every single one of them they show again for practical reasons I'm not judging on just stating a fact that we and these ones the planets are even on top of each other you aren't shown even this one it deceptively you know looks like it's a little more accurate in earth right next to the moon and this one even you know it's

It's crazy how that's the standard version of what we think. I mean, I'm sure everybody understands that they're not that close, but they probably have no idea how much further the planets are apart from each other than that. So to finish scales on this lady here, Chloe Baldry. She went camping for the first. time this weekend with friends prior to this I was ignorant of the Sisyphian task of collecting enough firewood to burn every day and every night through cold rainy days in order to keep warm imagine our ancestors how petty we

sometimes are today it's it's very it actually is to survive and that applies to scale because The scale of society allows us to specialize engineers that aren't just good at building things. We have engineers, we have nuclear engineers. We have electrical, we have industrial, within any given endeavor, infrastructure development. We have multiple engineers taking care of multiple components

or of particular components of, of that particular endeavor. It's just amazing the scale of society and what we're able to accomplish together. Here, from 1950 to 2020, last 70 years, another 70 year lead was infant mortality around the world. And this was deaths per thousand live births.

And so we have black, dark red, light red, light pink and white the black regions or the really really dark red I don't know it's low resolution I can't really tell you could see in or even anything you know a hundred you know even anything over a tenth of births so it's just amazing the progress um ubr boyo I've shouted him out a little bit he's he's an interesting online presence Creator. He says the 100-year war between England and France is what drove them to becoming organized nations. If you can rise to the challenge the stress being placed on modern Westerners will shape us into an incredible new force of originality. Always think optimistic. Again, it's

sort of the impetus for making this video, or at least me being interested is, you know, just part of my general perspective is the respect for perspective. It's a meta perspective, I guess. The more I read and realize I don't know, the more I value multiple perspectives, and the more I revere and respect people who are able to take a more sophisticated approach to any given problem specifically, or a certain. especially social problems that are always multivariate, always more than just one single thing that you can easily point to and say that's bad.

Get rid of it and everything will be perfect. You know, everything will be so much better. Everything is complex and has a lot of forces and tensions pulling at it. And you remove one, another tension might come into fill the void, or the other side of that spectrum might overcompensate, or overwhelm the system. You never know. You never know.

And it's another reason why it's important to have a large perspective and respect and understand that what we have is not to be taken for granted. And we really should. have gratitude for what we have something I struggle with all the time another perspective on time much much larger you know it before I do this because this it'll be a nice segue here this guy Christopher Consuelis I think he's an astronomer actually We tend to forget that a million is a huge number. If you go back a million days from today, the year would be 700 in 18 BC.

Everything that has happened since then, which is a lot, occurred less than a million days ago. So everything that's happened since then is pretty much most of civilization has happened a million less than a million days ago. ago I remember the difference between a million and a billion was a seconds a million seconds versus a billion seconds yeah someone said that basically you know a billion is a thousand times my my keyboard stopped working so I gave up on I think it was like a million seconds versus a billion seconds a million seconds is like 20 years ago 20 30 years ago and a billion seconds would be a thousand times that and when you really ask someone like oh how long ago do you think a million seconds would

be and then you ask them how long they think a billion seconds would be right after that whatever their answer might be whether it's two years in the past and then a billion would be you know maybe 10 years in the past that it's the perception of the closeness in relation of those two values that needs to be corrected because we're starting surrounded by these large, again, you know, time and space and complexity. It really, really pays to understand the significance between orders of magnitude. You know, especially with time and productivity, it really pays to recognize that incremental progress can radically change your life and your lifestyle and your, you know, even your

abilities, your skills, and your place in life in just a year. If you diligently practice that and it really helps to motivate yourself to recognize the veracity, the reality of incremental gains. If you just do 10 push-ups a day, every day for a year, well, not only by the first month, you'll be easily able to do, you know, 20, 30 push-ups, but by the end of the year, you'll be doing a hundred push-ups very, very easily. And it doesn't seem like that. But if you understand the, I guess, the concept of exponential growth, by understanding differences between orders of magnitude that helps you understand.

And really, what's the word I'm looking for? Really comprehend, really wrap your head around, you know, really take to heart and truly understand I guess is really the in the truest sense of the word to understand it to to be able to stand under it and grasp completely what that means to to recognize the difference between a million and a billion if you can't do one push-up today you the the visualization the fantasy of the idea of you doing the hundred push-ups in a row is so out of your realm of imagination, your understanding of what could be that you're inhibited from even trying towards that goal.

And that's my point, is recognizing the difference between a million and a billion, and that a million seconds is about 30 years ago, and a billion is a thousand times that. It's not 100 years ago. A billion seconds would be, if given a million seconds being about 30 years ago, a billion seconds would be 30,000 years ago. 30,000 years ago. And that's the same thing. If you think about what a kilometer is, or even, let's say, 10 kilometers, that'll help my point.

A thousand kilometers is. You know, it's roughly, what, 600 miles? I think we can somewhat understand that because that's about the distance most humans with a standard car could travel in about, you know, I guess, six hours, something like that, on the road, on the highway. You could travel 1,000 kilometers. And if increase that a thousand times,

that would be a million kilometers. about the time it takes six hours roughly and we increase that thousand times six thousand hours time it takes 22,500 work weeks if we drove you know if we had a really slow spaceship that travel at the rate that a standard you know highway speed limit is it would take almost 23,000 work weeks to get there to the sun from the earth anyways the last two I just wanted to show you here in the same vein the Tyrannosaurus rex is actually closer to humans 65 million years ago then the stegosaurus 77 million years before the T-rex the Tyrannosaurus rex that's like

Cleopatra and Caesar and Jesus closer to us in the history than they are to the builders of the pyramids. So to them, the pyramids were already older than we perceive, you know, those figures of history. Jesus and Caesar, you know, I mean, even really anybody from written history to be from the modern era. Maybe I should have put this in between. the difference, you know, distinction between Wright brothers to the moon and these Ice Age horses.

Let's see, the Chauvet cave over 33,000 years ago, and the Niao, I can't, these are all French names, the Naya, Nio, I know the X has always had a cave. About 15,000 years ago, his past, more time had passed between those two cave paintings. than the more recent one, which is, yeah, that's bizarre to think about. Culture had been in stasis with roughly, with minimal change, that minimal change, or maybe even backwards change overall, between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago,

and then relative to 15,000 years ago. to it really is worth considering perspectives not about just you know distance and space and scale and sizes of objects but the scale of time and I guess the rate of change of objects too that also falls into

either way maybe we'll make a big just a really long video out of this but I do think it's an important topic and something that is not addressed nearly enough. So some insight or sleep, one of the two. Either of the two is fine with me. Thanks for watching guys, we'll see you next time. Let's introduce some items.

Sun's kind of the limiting factor, because if you take a peppercorn is a thousand times, what, 400 times, the size of a period, distances between, we'll draw the planets to scale, objects and distances that the dog tag are posted, Posted notes that we can, I think I might draw the planet. The dissipatory, just useful to recognize that we often do see pictures like this side by side.

You know, we see these two, and we think astronomy and space, and we kind of lump them. This 50, so you understand the perspectives, which I certainly don't, but I'm getting better. The access are scissors. We have some pencils. probably use a pen or a pencil. He has 56 billion.

He has more like $100 billion. He just got divorced, so I think he might. Bill Gates earns, what that means is that he earns about, he earned over $3,000 per minute, $50 a second, $50 every second since Microsoft was created for seconds to bend down and pick it up. Unless he's really looking for the exercise.

He is not saving money. by picking the iPod. Very, very common everyday items. A pencil. They measure the MacBook area. And it says, you go to the hairdresser and they, if you're not familiar with blade sizes,

they maybe talk in terms of finger. I completely understand because it's your body, things that were tweeted it. Because I know I didn't get it directly from this website, but this is the comparison between a million seconds and a billion

seconds that I was looking for a million seconds is 12 days or a short you know vacation so I was off by an order of magnitude there no no by um three three orders of magnitude a thousand I was thinking of a trillion seconds being 30,000 years ago so a million seconds ago was two weeks ago roughly you know the middle of last week billion seconds ago was 30 years ago I've been alive for roughly a billion seconds

my entire life is just 12 days billions, 30 years a trillion is 30,000 years longer than the entire duration. It's three times maybe even you know six times if we use a millimeter

about roughly about half and a trillion so we go from down the street 600 miles along a city that's long days car ride on the highway away is actually just how the right triangle but you can break other triangles up and either into right triangles or you can use other characteristics of trick and metric Minneapolis Minnesota in Santa Fe in New Mexico she had her friend somewhere I think in New Mexico she was in Minneapolis

and she took a picture of the moon and her friend took a picture of the exposure they what that does is give you essentially once you understand the size of the earth that the curvature of the earth the distance between the two locations that the camera was taken at you could see the how the moon appears to have shifted it's the proposition she superimposed the pictures on top of one another and have to figure out how many pixels to a certain she got that triangle she knows the angles right here and here she was able to figure out the third angle which you know enough characteristics of any it's actually possible for the layman to understand where we understand you know how we know the distance to the moon

I feel like I feel like it's so glossed over how it's how we know you know the universe is as big and all these characteristics about space that we all love. Because it really, it's a way for us to confront the unknown. It's a minor adventure on a small scale. But so often they gloss over how we know this. They say, we know this, this and this. You should be amazed. Wow, 400 years ago,

intelligent, really diligent observers of the cosmos. Of course, these people were always princes and, you know, well, well to do, people if they weren't geniuses that worked their way up they always had but um they already understood the concept of parallax because they used triangulation a version of parallax to calculate distances to ships and very practical again probably well i say again i've talked about this before a lot of inventions come out of struggle well no i guess it goes to what uh i referred when i was referring to uber

Uber Boyle in his tweet was talking about how the tension of war and warring ideas on a more abstract level creates the impulse to make new innovations otherwise might. At least that's been our history and a version of utopia might be in the future for us to be able to educate and raise our young children in such a way. that they understand the finitude of life without having to endure the exposure to war and horrific trauma like that. Teaching them in a very hands-on way, mysteries of the to figure out. And that unified solidarity between among humans

to have a single or at least a small subset, a small group of mysteries are existence. You know, we say the universe, but really means our existence. We're born and we die, and in between them, we want to figure out as much as we can. We want to peel back the layers of nature as deep down and as microscopic, and as far away, and as macroscopic as we can, to really understand what the nature of it all is, the purpose, the Islamic geocentric object, around which stars and everything else, the sun and planets rapidly rotated. he was right about a lot of other things

and he made a lot of useful detailed observations that helped ratchet up our knowledge about the universe as it was transmitted across. This right here is why it's so hard for me when I don't, and I'm not diligent enough to actually really thoroughly read descriptions and I'm relying on diagrams.

This is so distorted that it really is really makes it hard to understand the principle. Next here is saying that this star looks these large stars here, so it's really, you know, much closer than these background stars, but, you know, to us, just looking at the sky, they're all just on one, one apparent single distance away, one big wall, really, really far away and in June on one side of the sun in our orbit this star would appear like this and then as we travel on the other side of the world and I sit in this angle here

it's going to get smaller and smaller so this angle is much smaller than this angle right here just imagine that this is drawn out this point right here represented by the fly and the little screwdriver is drawn out a thousand times further and these lines would appear to be practically parallel and that's how parallax works that's that's one foundational concept on which parallax is is applied at me 7 earth 107 63 Jupiter would be 559 feet, Saturn would be a thousand, Uranus would be double that, Neptune would be over triple that, and Pluto would be quadruple that, and this is, you know, roughly their, these are the average

orbits. It's 12 inches a foot, Mercury would be 0.04 inches, thighs of a grain of salt here. We get the peppercorn now, but it's roughly a little bit bigger than that. right there that would be that would be about what earth is okay so let's let's do that let's use that and then jupiter is going to be 30 let's say 1.2 inches 30 millimeters Saturn's going to be a little smaller at 1 inch 25 millimeters and then urnus and Neptune are going to be 0.4 and 0.39 inches respectively Pluto would be 0.02 inches okay so let's go ahead and draw this let's see if we can get this into a think this is a it's a Bitcoin by the way guys

now I'm just getting it to pop honestly don't even know where I got this it's it's one of those things that's just floating around your drawer for years and years and apparently for me it's been about 30 years almost we're gonna I think I'm gonna actually dispense with those objects we're gonna we're gonna make a much of little circles on our sticky notes cut them out and see let's see Jupiter is and I guess it's easier to just talk about it but it's just amazing the Sun would be this large cross mercury that small you can't really do the masses the actual amount of matter

and even the volume that that sphere would take up by looking at simply the diameter so mercury aside for a second and so if we got mercury right there um mercury and uh you know in fact all the terrestrial planets are so small that I'm just gonna just uh we'll just cut out we'll draw and cut out the gas giants mercury looks out pretty nice look at that I say that for word seasons I'm a dad and I had to was obligated to make that joke close this up cooks later and just because I haven't really addressed the rest of this little back of the envelope calculations as I was trying to say to point out of real quick just when to adjust this and this if the Earth moon distance was one inch

the distance star would be 30 almost 39 miles away so it's a yeah if we consider a star that's a hundred light years away if the Earth and Moon I should have got another grain of salt down distance if that was one inch and if it was one inch 20,000 miles the earth is roughly a 20th so a 20th of an inch would be way way smaller than that for the earth moon distance to only be one inch apart earth if that was the moon earth would have to be invisible 20th of an inch same size we'll do this on the plastic so bear with me if i make any sounds that i forget to edit out this is an extender here's the compass this device here threads you rotate them and they incrementally increase

accessories I guess those replacements goes in there and this extends much much much larger circles gonna be about twice the size of that so and here oh I can do miles that's bad like that that's really cool I just wanted some metal little here's our standard by which we're going to measure things got millimeters up here inches down here and size of the size of these I want to measure these it's measured the earth let's pretend that's the actual real real measurement actually look this is where this can be pretty useful assuming we can get close enough I don't know can't close enough to be able to be able to be

to pick it up. I'd say it's a five and a half. All right so it's five and a half millimeters and enter that. Yeah we're going to enter that our earth is let's enter that let's make it 14 even further aside exactly six hundred and and nine and a half millimeters or two feet 24 inches two of these two of these right here won't even fit in camera that's awesome that's the but that is the diameter so that's actually really perfect because that means that this right here from here to here is gonna be the radius I just think it's locked in these aren't gonna be the most accurate measurements ever

I can't do 12 because this works like you put it in the center and you drive around the center. So this distance would be the radius. Doesn't look like we can reach. The lid goes in. You start appreciating good ideas. So much better. A fork wraps around the inside of this wheel. This little bar the screw. A single sheet of paper will take two pieces together. But for now it's just... Ooh, that's almost there. 40, 40 feet. Because it makes it look much larger than... that it is. Yeah, let's not, I want to try to convey the actual size of the moon relative to the distance away from Earth.

All right, there's our moon right there. Dubs I genuinely wonder, like, I've never actually done again this exercise. So, this is just a personal, personal interest in mind that I wanted to explore and elaborate and understand for myself. all right so if earth is 5.5 is 18 feet um just speeds trying to understand whether it's the radius or diameter yeah the sun's given in the diameter so we're going to assume that it's the diameter 18 feet that's another diameter that's another nine times the sun and the coolest star is only about 3.8 inches. So that tiny compared to the sun.

And then a red giant beetle juice, not even the largest red giant, so there's stars even larger out there than beetle juice, but beetle juice, which is in the, it's the top left shoulder of Orion, I believe, is 750 feet on our scale right here. 750 feet. It's 375 times what our sun is right here.

Sorry, and if you can hear that it's June, she's having a meltdown out there. I guess the grandmas are, she's given the grandma, the second grandma just showed up, so the grandma's. The grandma's, and technically is classified as a dwarf, so gives you an idea of the scale, the, the magnetism, on which dwarves exist versus the red giants for instance they're about you know five five hundred to a thousand times larger speed of light here I thought this was really particularly injured fingers moving at the speed of light just so you guys can see I'm zoom in seven times moving in a straight line that fast for eight

straight minutes that would be about eight minutes two thousand one low that download time watching that the download bar is about how long it takes light to get from this sun 400 times longer times longer than the earth 400 times um wider than the earth before we do the volume I just wanted to say the light year light travels about 131 millimeters this far in a second. A light year is 25,000, no no, sorry, 2,500 miles. So the nearest star roughly about four light years away is 10,000 miles away. 10,000 miles. That's, well, that's about, let's say from to Indonesia.

scale to be our star if it were this large we have to go 10,000 miles away almost halfway around the earth ximo centauri almost exactly is the earth has a the rocky planets it's rocky the earth has an iron mantle I mean we have a lot denser elements in it so 130 1.3 million of these but it's only 330,000 times figure out let's go ahead and figure out the gas giants in place them I'll say 60 30 50 so let's say 50.5 smaller about half the size less than half and we have a measure from here real quick urnus 20 meters in diameter scissors I thought of me as large is a lot closer to Jupiter and Saturn. We got Neptune there much easier to cut.

closest and largest of the gas giants, the shepherd of the inner plants. Shepherding with its gravitational field. Many asteroids. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars. And we got the... this website was created in 1997. And just because there was, you know, maybe... you know, maybe a couple hundred more fields that were being calculated. The guy actually warned that it might take a lot longer

to load those calculations. Testimate to the improvement sizes are accurate here and the only accurate distance is actually the Earth to the Moon, which is pretty incredible. The ISS wouldn't even register on this scale. You'd have to maybe make the Earth as big as the Earth as the Moon, the Sun is right here and then maybe lower the orbit would be something like maybe something like that right there just died okay so you guys can't see that

maybe like half an inch off the Sun Mercury would be at this scale that we have here and I'll just superimpose previous image of this Mercury would be 83 feet away from this two foot wide sun. Venus would be 150 feet away. Earth just over 200 feet away. Mars would be quite a bit further, but still manageably understandably close, at 330 feet away. And Jupiter is pretty, starting to get pretty far away at 1,000 feet away. 1,118 feet away.

And then it's interesting that Mars's orbit is about twice the distance from Earth as Earth is from Venus. And Saturn's twice the distance from Jupiter, as Jupiter is from the sun. So it's pretty interesting and then that this pattern emerges and it has to do with orbital resonances. So many other planets that didn't neatly fall into these distances that are multiples of each other on average. Probably would have either gotten swallowed by another planet or booted, gravitationally speaking, out of the sun. solar system maybe billions of years ago so Saturn's 2,000 feet away that's half a mile at this point and then Uranus is 4,000 miles uh feet on this scale uranus is almost a mile away it's about 80% of a mile and then Neptune is over a mile almost a mile and a half away Neptune would be almost

a mile and a half away if our sun was only two feet sitting 200 feet away from the sun that's so far I really hope this man it helped me it really is actually really fun to practice these visualizations and you know flushing out these these concepts specifically if if anything else like I said the distance to the moon I think it's It's really interesting the true distance and proportions of the planet's sizes and the interplanetary distance between us. It takes light 20 minutes to get between Earth and Mars, for instance. I hope you had a good time.

We'll see you next time.