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On scale
7 years ago
"This little circle in the drawing is the Earth. Now here she is again, only even bigger, because THIS little circle is the UNIVERSE." We can draw in our little boxes and tell ourselves it's convincing, but to truly have a sense of scale you have to be present in a real space and take it in.
So let me tell you what it's been like, driving across open country for hours with the entire sky all around. That sense of scale is integral to its worldly beauty. It's also potent fuel for macrophile thoughts. To look directly at this respectable hill nearby, or that actual mountain further off, or the whole distance BETWEEN here and the mountain, and picture how a body would cover it while looking at the real size of it, that's stirring and inspiring in a way that's hard to match.
So let me tell you what it's been like, driving across open country for hours with the entire sky all around. That sense of scale is integral to its worldly beauty. It's also potent fuel for macrophile thoughts. To look directly at this respectable hill nearby, or that actual mountain further off, or the whole distance BETWEEN here and the mountain, and picture how a body would cover it while looking at the real size of it, that's stirring and inspiring in a way that's hard to match.
It takes me about 25-30 minutes to get to work a distance of 20 miles away. If I were to walk that far without stopping it would take most of a day. If I were as tall as a large office building it would take about half an hour. If I were the size of the Empire State Building it would take about the same amount of time it takes me to walk to the bathroom from my desk at work right now, and each of my footsteps would cover a row of five suburban housing lots, or a small strip mall, and the average human would be the size of a large ant to me.
Wikipedia has a list of over 200 mountains in the U.S. that are 10 times taller than the Empire State Building. The world is big.