The Ultimate Collection of Scaling Visualisations

Lots of links to scaling visualisations and size comparisons from galaxy clusters to the carbon atom.

• Amazing: Scale of the Universe

…check out this incredible interactive Flash animation from NewGrounds that provides a scale of the Universe, from the very small (0.0000000001 yoctometers) to as large as we know, the estimated size of the Universe. Click here to access, and after it loads, use the slider at the bottom to zoom in and out. Gives you a new appreciation for all that’s out there, big and small!

newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347

• Cell Size and Scale

learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

• Powers of 10 New!

• The Stars and the Grand Universe

• Holy Cow We’re Small! Biggest Stars to Biggest Galaxies

astranaut.org/holy_cow_were_small_biggest_stars.php

• The Known Universe by AMNH

• My Location in the Universe

xixidu.net/location/

• Did you know?

If New York to Chicago = from Earth to Alpha Centauri, then Earth to the Moon is equivalent to 0.3 millimeters.

scienceblogs.com/gnxp/habitable_planets_alpha_centau.php

• Solar System Scale Model

This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here.

phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/

• A simulated voyage through the solar system

At the speed of today’s fastest spacecraft (~20 km/second), it would take almost ten years to travel this distance. Even at the speed of light, the trip would last 5 1/2 hours. In this animation, the apparent speed of the viewer is over 300 times the speed of light.

classzone.com/earth_science/visualizations/

• Infographic: Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench New!

ouramazingplanet.com/infographic/

• Height
  

xkcd.com/482/

• Gravity Wells

xkcd.com/681_large/

• The MegaPenny Project

Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: “What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?”

kokogiak.com/megapenny/

• What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

pagetutor.com/trillion/

• 1 pixel = 1 million dollars
  

i.imgur.com/C5hAo.gif

• One Trillion Dollars Visualized

• How bad hyperinflation can get

The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.

boingboing.net/how-bad-hyperinflati.html

• Trillions

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age.

• Infographic: The Mariana Trench To Scale

It`s the deepest part of the world`s ocean and the lowest elevation of the surface of the Earth. Yeah, it`s that deep.

i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=47264

• A Visual Comparison of Various Distances
  

falstad.com/scale/

• Timeline: Future of an expanding universe  — 10^6 years to 10^100 years and beyond.
  

wikipedia.org/Future_of_an_expanding_universe#Timeline

• Graphical timeline from Big Bang to Heat Death

wikipedia.org/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Bang_to_Heat_Death

• Tanker Size Comparison

wikimedia.org/Tanker-size-comparison.png

• Infographic: the complete and astounding history of storage

xixidu.tumblr.com/infographic-the-compleat-and-astounding-history

• Infographic: A Day in the Internet

Some of us never realize how huge the Internet really is.

onlineeducation.net/internet/

• It’s a small world…

The Photonics Research Group of Ghent University-IMEC has fabricated a world map on a scale of 1 trillionth.

photonics.intec.ugent.be/publications/MediaCoverage/2009-12-17/

• A sense of proportion
  

When thinking about existential risks it is important to have a sense of what the stakes are, and not just think “that is bad” – some things can be many orders of magnitude worse than others. At the same time, as Nick Bostrom pointed out, we have rather minimal research on how to prevent human extinction, about the same size as the literature on dung beetle reproduction. Toby Ord has pointed out that some charities can be up to 10,000 times more efficient in providing health than others (in terms of years of life per dollar donated), just because they focus on particular very effective means. Aubrey de Grey showed a pretty minor advance in biogerontology that was hailed in the media as “the secret of ageing”, while rattling of a series of papers with far more profound implications that nobody outside the field has heard of. A graph of cost and size of carbon abatement methods clearly shows that some fix a vastly bigger chunk than others.

aleph.se/andart/a_sense_of_proportion.html