Powers of ten
Zoom from a single atom all the way out to the entire universe. Every step makes the last one look tiny.
Scroll to zoom out ↓
A proton
A proton, deep inside the nucleus of an atom. This is about as small as anything you can sensibly call a 'size'.
A proton isn't even solid — it's three quarks held together by a force so strong it would take the energy of a thrown baseball to pull just two of them apart.
If the nucleus were a marble on the centre spot of a football stadium, the whole atom would be the entire stadium. Everything else is empty.
An atom
A single atom — about a hundred thousand times bigger than the proton at its heart. Atoms are almost entirely empty space.
You are made of roughly 7 octillion atoms — a 7 followed by 27 zeros. Almost all of them are billions of years old, forged inside dead stars.
No one has ever truly 'seen' an electron orbiting. It exists as a fuzzy cloud of probability, everywhere around the nucleus at once until you measure it.
DNA
The DNA double helix. About two metres of it are coiled inside almost every single one of your cells.
If you uncoiled all the DNA in your body and laid it end to end, it would stretch to the Sun and back — dozens of times over.
Your DNA is 99.9% identical to every other human's. Everything that makes you you is hidden in the last 0.1%.
A virus
A virus — so small that around a thousand of them could sit side by side across a single human hair.
A virus isn't quite alive. On its own it does nothing; it can only copy itself by hijacking one of your cells.
There are an estimated 10³¹ virus particles on Earth — more than the number of stars in the observable universe.
A bacterium
A bacterium, like E. coli. In ideal conditions, a single one can divide every twenty minutes.
You carry roughly as many bacterial cells as human ones. By that count, you are only about half 'you'.
From one bacterium, unchecked division would in a single day produce a mass heavier than the Earth. Nature, thankfully, checks it.
A red blood cell
A red blood cell, about 7 millionths of a metre wide. Your body makes roughly two million of them every second.
You have around 25 trillion red blood cells. Each one makes a full loop of your body about once a minute, for roughly four months, then is recycled.
Lined up, the red blood cells in one person would wrap around the Earth's equator more than three times.
A human hair
The width of a single human hair — about 70 millionths of a metre. This is roughly the smallest thing your eye can see unaided.
Everything smaller than this — cells, DNA, atoms — is invisible to you. You've lived your whole life surrounded by a world you can never directly see.
A grain of sand
A single grain of sand — and there are more stars in the universe than sand grains on every beach on Earth.
Each grain is itself made of millions of millions of atoms. The journey you just took from a proton to here fits entirely inside this one speck.
An ant
A worker ant. For its size, one of the strongest animals alive — it can carry many times its own body weight.
All the ants on Earth together weigh roughly as much as all the wild birds and mammals combined.
An ant has no lungs and no ears. It breathes through tiny holes in its body and 'hears' by feeling vibrations through its feet.
A cat
A house cat — about half a metre long. The first scale on this journey big enough to look back at you.
A cat sees about six times better than you in the dark, but can't focus on anything closer than around 30 cm from its face.
You
You — about 1.7 metres tall. Roughly the only scale on this whole journey that feels normal.
You sit almost exactly halfway between the smallest and the largest things in this experience — about as many powers of ten below you as above.
Everything from here on out is bigger than you will ever physically touch.
A blue whale
A blue whale, up to 30 metres long — the largest animal that has ever lived, bigger than any dinosaur we know of.
Its heart is roughly the size of a small car, and its tongue alone can weigh as much as an elephant.
A blue whale's call can reach 188 decibels and travel for hundreds of kilometres through the ocean — louder than a jet engine.
The Burj Khalifa
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai — 828 metres, the tallest building in the world, more than twice the height of the Empire State Building.
At this scale a human being is a single pixel. You could stack about 480 people head to toe to reach the top.
It's so tall that people on the ground floor can watch the sun set, take the lift up, and watch it set a second time.
Mount Everest
Mount Everest — 8,849 metres. Its summit sits in the jet stream, where the air holds barely a third of the oxygen at sea level.
Everest is the highest point above sea level, but not the tallest mountain. Measured from its base on the seafloor, Hawaii's Mauna Kea is over 10,000 m.
The rock at Everest's peak was once an ocean floor. It's studded with the fossils of sea creatures, lifted 8 km into the sky.
A megacity
A sprawling megacity — around 20 km across, home to tens of millions of people living almost on top of one another.
From here, the tallest building and the tallest mountain are both just texture. Everest itself is now smaller than a single city block.
A country
A whole country, seen from orbit — around a thousand kilometres of coastlines, mountains and cities in a single glance.
You could line up every city, every person, every blue whale you've seen so far edge to edge and not even cover one country.
From this height the curve of the Earth is finally obvious. The horizon stops being a line and becomes an arc.
The Moon
The Moon — 3,476 km across, about a quarter of Earth's width and roughly the span of a large country.
Only 12 people have ever walked on the Moon — and all of them did so between 1969 and 1972. No one has returned since.
Every planet in the Solar System could fit, side by side, in the empty space between the Earth and the Moon — with room to spare.
Earth
Earth. As far as we know, the only place in the entire universe that holds life.
Every human who has ever lived, every war, every story, everything that has ever mattered to anyone — all of it happened on this one pale blue dot.
Earth is smoother than a billiard ball. If you shrank it to that size, Everest and the deepest trench would be tinier bumps than the ball's own polish marks.
Jupiter
Jupiter — the largest planet. More than 1,300 Earths could fit inside it, and it weighs more than all the other planets combined.
Its Great Red Spot is a single storm wider than the entire Earth, that has been raging for at least 150 years.
Jupiter is essentially a failed star. Had it gathered about 80 times more mass, it would have ignited and we'd live in a system with two suns.
Saturn's rings
Saturn's ring system spans nearly 280,000 km from edge to edge — more than 20 Earths placed side by side — yet in places just 10 metres thick.
Saturn is so light for its size that, if you could find an ocean big enough, the whole planet would float in it.
The rings are made of billions of chunks of almost pure water ice, from tiny grains to boulders the size of houses, all locked in a flat orbit.
The Sun
The Sun. About 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it — and it's a completely average star.
The Sun makes up 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System. Everything else — every planet, moon, asteroid and comet — is the leftover crumbs.
Light leaving the Sun's core takes tens of thousands of years to fight its way to the surface — then just eight minutes to reach your eyes.
Earth's orbit
The distance from the Earth to the Sun: 150 million km. Even at light-speed, that takes eight minutes.
This distance is so useful it has its own unit — the astronomical unit. The whole Solar System is mapped in multiples of this single gap.
A passenger jet flying nonstop would take about 19 years to cover the distance you just zoomed past.
The Solar System
The orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet. Sunlight takes over four hours just to reach the edge.
The Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977 and the fastest object we've ever sent outward, only crossed this boundary decades later. It is still the most distant human-made thing.
One light-year
One light-year — about 9.5 trillion km. The distance light, the fastest thing there is, travels in a single year.
The entire Solar System you just left would be a barely-visible dot at this scale. And one light-year is still a tiny step in what's coming.
The Oort Cloud
The Oort Cloud — a vast shell of frozen comets surrounding the Sun, possibly reaching a quarter of the way to the next star.
The Sun's true edge isn't Neptune. Its gravity holds this cloud of trillions of icy bodies thousands of times farther out.
The nearest star
Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun — 4.24 light-years away. And that's our next-door neighbour.
Our fastest spacecraft would take roughly 75,000 years to get there. All of recorded human history is shorter than that journey.
The light you'd see from Proxima tonight left it over four years ago — before today, this year, even last year had happened.
The Orion Nebula
A stellar nursery like the Orion Nebula — about 24 light-years of glowing gas and dust where new stars are being born right now.
Our own Sun was born in a cloud like this, around 4.6 billion years ago. So were you — every atom heavier than hydrogen in your body was cooked inside an earlier generation of stars.
A globular cluster
A globular cluster — hundreds of thousands to millions of ancient stars packed into a glittering ball, orbiting our galaxy.
These are some of the oldest objects in the universe — many formed over 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang itself.
In the heart of one, stars are so densely packed that the night sky would blaze with thousands of stars brighter than our full Moon.
The Milky Way
Our galaxy, the Milky Way: 100 to 400 billion stars. The Sun is just one of them, out on a quiet spiral arm.
Everything you've ever seen with your naked eye in the night sky lives inside this one galaxy — and you can only see a few thousand of its hundreds of billions of stars.
It takes our Sun about 230 million years to circle the galaxy once. The last time it was here, dinosaurs were just beginning.
Andromeda
Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy — 2.5 million light-years away, and slowly falling toward us.
In about 4.5 billion years, Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide and merge. The night sky will be ablaze — but the galaxies are so empty that almost no two stars will actually hit.
Its light left Andromeda 2.5 million years ago, before our species existed. You are quite literally looking into the deep past.
The Local Group
The Local Group — our galactic neighbourhood of about 80 galaxies, spanning some 10 million light-years.
The Milky Way and Andromeda are the two giants here. The other ~80 galaxies are mostly tiny dwarfs orbiting them like moths around two lamps.
Laniakea
The Laniakea Supercluster. Our galaxy is one of about 100,000, all drifting together toward something called the Great Attractor.
Laniakea means 'immeasurable heaven' in Hawaiian. We didn't even know we lived inside this structure until 2014.
The Sloan Great Wall
The Sloan Great Wall — a sheet of galaxies over a billion light-years long, one of the largest structures ever found.
On the very largest scales, galaxies aren't scattered randomly. They string together into glowing filaments and walls around vast empty voids — a structure astronomers call the cosmic web.
The observable universe
The observable universe — about 93 billion light-years across, holding an estimated 2 trillion galaxies. You started at a single proton.
This is only the part we can see — the universe almost certainly continues far beyond, perhaps forever. We may never know how much more there is.
Every galaxy here holds billions of stars; many of those stars hold planets. Somewhere out there may be another small creature, scrolling.
From the proton to everything · thinky.fun
You travelled from a single proton to the edge of the observable universe.
Every step you scrolled made the one before it look like nothing. That's the actual scale of reality — and you're somewhere in the middle of it.
Make a friend feel small too