June 27, 2006
These two links I found (thanks, Howard!) make rare use of the browser's near-inifinite ability to scroll, but showing us just how much nothing there is in the universe.
First off, the solar system to scale. The smallest planet, Pluto, is a single pixel at the far right edge of the page. Everything else -- other planets, the sun, and the distances between them -- are to scale. The sun is about 560 pixels across, and Earth looks to be about 8x8. (I'm actually not sure the sun isn't supposed to be much bigger than that, but I'll take their word for now.) If your monitor resolution is 96 ppi, the page is about four tenths of a mile wide.
And that's not the big one. Move on now to an atom. The proton (they used a picture of Neptune) is in scale to the single-pixel electron way off to the right. There are fifty million pixels between them. At the standard resolution of 96 ppi that's a web page 8ΒΌ miles wide. Clicking and holding in the scroll bar's gutter, it takes about three seconds for the slider to move at all. And remember, there's absolutely, positively nothing between that proton and that electron. Nothing.
Sitting where I am now, with the computer screen roughly pointing north-south, the page runs roughly in the direction of the office. When I'm looking at Neptune, which is slightly larger than will fit on my screen at once, that one-pixel electron is twice as far away as my desk at work. Unfortunately, Google Maps doesn't understand "8 miles south of [address]", so I had to make a rough guess using Photoshop. Here's how big this web page is:
And that tiny little pixel down on the other side of Manassas is all that keeps us from passing through everything else in the universe. Cool, huh?
