Hello there I'm Jake Roper brother, son, friend to no one.
If you’ve been a DONG fan for a while you may remember a website we showed called scaleofuniverse.com.
It’s a very neat interactive experience that shows you just how tiny and just how
enormous things can get.
And for more tiny and enormous DONGs here are some things you can do online now guys.
Let me ask you this.
How many smoots tall are you?
I am 1.07 smoots.
WHOA JAKE WHAT EVEN IS A SMOOT.
Thanks for asking.
It’s a hilarious measurement made up because of a man named Oliver R. Smoot.
His fraternity pledge was to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge using his body which
was 5 foot 7 inches or one smoot.
That would make the Empire State building 260.4 smoots.
This google mapped route from LA to New York City, well that's 2,645,044 smoots.
The distance to the moon is 225,920,955 smoots.
There are other strange measurements like a beard second, the length an average beard
grows in a second.
For example I am 365,760,000 beard seconds tall.
The CN tower is 110,642,400,000 beard seconds.
The great wall of China is 4,239,333,964,800,000 beard seconds.
This website allows you to covert smoots or beard seconds into other measurements and vice versa.
A beard second is 5 nanometers.
World Science Festival has a great video that helps you gauge how tiny a nanometer is.
There are other ridiculous measurements out there like one Warhol based off Andy Warhol’s
statement that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”
So if you’re famous for 1 kilowarhol you'd be famous for 15,000 minutes.
Good job.
But what is the smallest measurement?
Well let’s go back to Scale of Universe.
We start with Planck Length a distance so tiny it’s difficult to wrap your head around.
In fact it is the smallest distance between two things before they are considered to be
in the exact same location.
An atom is about 48,261,724,457 planck lengths.
Now let's se how long you have to zoom out just to get to the size of a carbon atom.
Again, it’s difficult to comprehend things on this minute of a scale since we can’t see them with our naked
eye or even a clothed eye which is I guess what glasses would be. So let's check out cell size and scale.
We’ll start off at a carbon atom, the smallest thing this site shows.
Zooming out a bit we’ll pass some viruses, a human egg, a sperm cell, a grain of salt,
a sesame seed and now a coffee bean.
Fun fact: a grain of salt is estimated to have around 1.2 quintillion
atoms.
That number looks like this by the way.
Now let’s go back to scale of the universe.
Hey! hey hey hey! There we are!
Now let's keep zooming out and we'll see a T-rex which is big compared to people but
some dinosaurs sizes might surprise you.
This chart shows a 5 foot 6 tall guy as compared to a bunch of them.
What comes to mind when you hear velociraptor?
For me it’s those scary guys from Jurassic Park that can open doors and they eat Muldoon. MULDOON!
But good news. They're roughly the size of a turkey. So what does that mean? Well you could kick them.
Really far. How far? I don't know. Probably into orbit. Into the sun. Potentially.
They also had feathers so if we saw one today we might just think it’s a weird looking murderous bird.
On the other hand when dinosaurs aren’t busy being the size of turkeys they can be
pretty behemoth.
The brachiosaurus is the largest known dinosaur and could eat vegetation as high as 30 feet
off the ground.
It is to this day the largest known land animal ever.
That’s pretty big but the largest animal to have ever lived is actually alive today and do you know what it is?
Leave a comment down below. OH it's a
blue whale. Good work! You did it!
This site lets you get up close and personal with a blue whale.
Now blue whales it's hard to
It’s hard to fathom just how big they are but let me give you some facts
that might blow your mind but they probably won't because your very smart and attractive.
They can way up to 181,437 kg.
That’s close to half a million pounds, almost as much as I can bench, ladies.
Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant.
AN ELEPHANT!!!!!
Their hearts unlike my black hole are around 204 kg, about the size of a car.
The daily requirement of an adult blue whale is around 1.5 million calories.
And now let’s say you eat an average of 2,000 calories a day.
It would take you over 2 years to eat what one blue whale eats in a single day.
Challenge accepted.
Now let’s go back to scale of the universe and zoom out a bit further.
Okay here we have Vatican City, the smallest country in the world.
Still bigger than myself, a blue whale, or a Planck Length but as far as countries go, it’s
not very big.
Thetruesize.com is a really neat site that shows you well, the true size of countries.
When projecting a 3D globe onto a 2D map there’s room for errors and distortion.
The most popular map projection that you’re probably familiar with is the Mercator projection
and it distorts the sizes of countries close to the poles.
For example, Africa and Greenland look to be about roughly the same size but in reality Africa
is much much larger than Greenland. Sorry Greenland. You're still great and I love you.
We are given three countries for comparison: The United States, India, and China.
Look what happens when we drag the U.S. over Africa.
It pales in comparison.
But now drag it up here and it becomes very clear that Africa and Greenland are nowhere
near the same size.
Let’s wrap that map back into a globe and here is our beautiful Earth.
It seems big and beautiful because for the most part it’s all we’ve ever experienced firsthand so
it’s hard to conceptualize just how tiny it really is in the scope of the universe.
But let’s at least try shall we.
So this is Earth, larger than Mars, Mercury and Venus but zoom out a hohoho holy moly!
it looks pretty small.
Now let’s say you wanted to drive around the whole Earth because why not.
It would be close to a 40233.6 kilometer trek so all you have to do is not sleep or go to
the bathroom or go insane from claustrophobia...
I mean I guess you could sleep because we're not timing you on how fast you could go
Anyways if you wanted to do it in one go you'd have to keep a pace of 80.47 kph and you should
get there in a short 21 days with no breaks.
But it would take you over 227 days of nonstop driving to get around all of Jupiter at the same speed.
Other than a lack of patience I see no reason why you couldn’t do it.
And remember my dear child. No matter how many Warhols you are famous for, no matter how many smoots you are
stay humble because in the grand scheme of things you are pretty tiny. Which is a beautiful thing!
And as al...no.
You know what I'm not gonna say and as always thanks for watching just yet. Oh no I just did it.