You Are The Center of The Universe (Literally)

A three story building is about 10 meters tall, six times bigger than you. In the opposite direction, six times smaller than you, you get things like a cute squirrel about 27 centimetres small. So the building is just as big relative to you as you are to a squirrel. You're in the middle. It's easy to understand. In fact, you are in the middle of everything in the Universe.

Let's go on a fantastical journey together, to the small and the large and see if it's really true! An A320 is 37 meters long. The Rufous hummingbird is around 7 centimetres. Both of these fliers are 23 times bigger or smaller than you, and both fly intercontinental distances - the tiny bird migrates between Alaska and Mexico! If the hummingbird were the same size as the jet, it would circle the Earth 85 times every year! Dinoponera, the largest ant in the world, is about 55 times smaller than you. Their small colonies have around 100 individuals but no queens – instead they ruthlessly compete for status within the nest, which can reach 1.2 meters deep.

If humans lived like Dinoponera, we’d be building towers of over 25 stories filled with offices and ruthlessly competing for status and... wait… The deadliest and most annoying insect in the world is the mosquito, 235 times smaller than you, while on the other end the Empire State Building is about that much larger than you. Kind of unimaginable how something this small creates so much devastation for something that big. We are getting to the borders of human perception now. Like coarse grains of sand about 3 millimeters, 550 times smaller than you. You can feel their shape and roughness between your fingers and if you focus, see them individually.

We mix them into concrete that can hold up the tallest towers ever built, like the 828 meter tall Burj Khalifa that is 500 times larger than you. If you were that tall, people would be as small to you as grains of sand in your hand. Hey! Be gentle. Anything smaller or bigger and it becomes hard to grasp. A medium sized city like Lisbon is about 6000 times larger than yourself and permeated by a network of highways, roads and alleys. On the other end, about 6000 times smaller than you, are your small arteries permeating your whole body.

Actually, you are in the middle between your network of blood vessels and the network of a city like Lisbon. If you think of a city as a living being, you find more and more parallels. A small alley is as small to the city as an arteriole 0.1 millimeters wide is to you. Your tiniest capillaries are to you what the pipes bringing water to homes are to Lisbon. Going further, 100,000 times smaller than you, we reach a typical skin cell about 30 micrometers in diameter; a Neutrophil is half as big and one of your red blood cells is merely 7 micrometers.

They are as small to you as you are to the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area, the largest urban area in the world spanning over 160 km. You are so incredibly big, filled with so much complexity, so many different moving parts. Or are you just a cell in the human civilization superstructure? Are you both? Our steps are getting larger and larger now. Germany is around 875 km from North to South and the 4th biggest agricultural exporter in the world. Rhizobia is a nitrogen-fixing bacteria up to 3 micrometers long and without it, that sort of agricultural production is impossible.

So we have a country and a bacterium depending on each other, and you are in the middle, both being roughly 550,000 times larger or smaller than you. What about the whole Earth? It’s about 12,700 km in diameter; about 7.7 million times larger than you. On the other side of the scale is Corynebacterium, as little as 0.3 micrometers across, living on your skin and eyes along with 100 billion other bacteria. More than ten times more than there are humans on earth. Again you are in the center.

Right in the middle of something so large that our civilization is a mere scratch on its surface, and something so small and numerous you never notice its presence even as it touches you. Does that make you feel small, or big? From here on out, your brain is breaking a bit. Four times wider than Earth is Neptune, a cold blue gas giant 49,500 km wide. The largest planet though is Jupiter, 140,000 km in diameter. A titanic abyss shrouded in terrible winds.

You could drop Earth whole into its depths and it would simply vanish. On the opposite scale, we find the deadly West Nile virus, 50 nanometers in diameter. Or one step down, the spike proteins on a coronavirus that open up cells for its RNA payload – they are as small to you as you are to the planet Jupiter. You are in the middle between gigantic planets and the world of viruses. These tiny things. So deadly. Let that sink in – a tiny virus is taking over and killing lung cells up to 500 times larger than itself, with the help of a tiny protein weapon.

That is like you trying to kill a giant the size of the Burj Khalifa with a screwdriver. But the real boss of the Solar System is the Sun. Ten times bigger than Jupiter, a billion times larger than you, controlling all the planets and source of all energy that drives life. A billion times smaller than you, clearly the boss of our body is a DNA strand, containing all the information making your life possible. You’re right in the middle between the most important factors keeping everything alive.

From here on, things just kind of stop making sense. A billion is already too much but now everything just seems to mean ‘a lot’. The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is 14.5 billion times bigger than you. A hydrogen atom is 15.5 billion times smaller than you. Yeah, ok sure. But the thing is, we are not even close to being done and it's not impossible to get at least a sense of how these scale. The solar system is 22 trillion times larger than you – On the other end of the scale is the wavelength of low energy neutrinos released from fusion reactions in our Sun – about a hundred trillion of them are passing through you every single second, like ghosts a trillion times smaller than you, basically never hitting any of the particles inside you.

If you moved through the solar system in a straight line you probably wouldn't hit anything either. Although things are beginning to get really weird now. A single proton at the heart of the hydrogen atom is almost exactly 1 quadrillion times smaller than you. If the proton were as big as you, the hydrogen atoms would be taller than twelve Mt. Everests. On the other end, we meet something that just breaks human brains: the incredible vastness of space; we just have no reference for these distances at all. The distance to the closest star to earth, Alpha Centauri, is not 1 quadrillion times in the other direction from the tiny proton – but 24 quadrillion.

Space is just so large it is kind of mean. And it goes on like this. A quintillion times smaller than you is the strange world of the quarks. The proton is not actually like a tiny ball but kind of just a ripple on the surface of the ocean of quarks. Every moment, countless quarks pop into existence, along with their anti-particle enemies, before doing furious battle and annihilating each other in an instant. How many? Impossible to say because the harder you look for them the more quarks seem to appear.

We’re simplifying so much it’s like a lie anyway. However we choose to illustrate this, it's wrong. What actually is a quark, what does it look like to human minds? Nobody knows. As you sit here, confused, let’s look up again. The ocean of quarks in a proton, inside a single atom of a single cell of your body is as small to you as you are compared to a sphere around 174 light years across, containing about 16 thousand stars.

And this is just a tiny speck of dust to our galaxy. The Milky Way is close to one sextillion times larger than you. At the opposite end, we have particles a sextillion times smaller than yourself; like the wavelength of high energy neutrinos released when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere. We are getting to the end. The Observable Universe is 93 billion light years in diameter. Close to a billion billion billion human lengths. But it’s still finite.

It’s ‘only’ 465,000 Milky Ways side by side. If you were the size of our galaxy, the observable Universe would only be a day’s drive across. On the other end of that scale, we have the tiniest particle ever detected, a proton traveling so close to the speed of light it got squished into a pancake. As small compared to you as the whole Observable Universe is big to you. We are at the border of things that we have evidence for – are you truly in the middle of everything?

The theoretical smallest physical distance is the Planck length, a hundred million times smaller than even the pancake proton. But we don’t know if it's real, only that our theories of the universe break down here. Likewise on the other end, does the bigness of the universe match the smallness of the Planck length? Well, actually the universe could be considerably larger than that. But we will never know.

Let’s go back and look at the dimensions again. There are so many big things and so many small things wrapped up in them. The universe seems to be exactly the right size – with you in the middle. How do you try to get it exactly right, say when you have to make a big choice like buying a new mattress? You probably compare trustworthy reviews and test out a few models. But what if you plan to spend money on something you can’t just return to the seller – and the decision doesn’t just affect your aching back?

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