A beautiful and entertaining graphic depiction of the relative size of various life forms.
I've always loved perceptions about size. I've collected them over the years using my tag "big and small" — you know, the large boulder the size of a small boulder, the Santa Claus hat, and all the rest — so I'm happy to have something else, something so good, to add to my collection.
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31 comments:
Thanks for posting that, Althouse. It's mighty big of you.
"Peníses of the Animal Kingdom" was late 20th century wall poster. I'm sure that for each creature they were large peníses the size of small peníses.
Fred Hoyle sci fi had a gaseous life-form obscuring the sun while it recharged. A panel of scientists and experts from around the world converged in London to figure out what to do about it. As I remember they negotiated with it.
The part about London didn't age well.
Powers of Ten is the classicsize comparison book
I'll never forget the analogy my physics professor used to conceptualize the scale of an atomic nucleus. If the atom and its electron shells were a football stadium, an atomic nucleus would be a golf ball on the 50 yard line.
Phenomenal Cosmic Power!!! Ity Bity Living Space.
A cool depiction with a touch of self-deprecating humor.
Human = A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites.
I'd replace "ape" with primate... and "website" with blog.
A chiquita banana is taller than Newsom's brain.
I have an app that developed by some high school kid that does a size comparison starting with sub-atomic particles so small they are only theoretical (quantum foam) and goes though a hundred or so items--atomic particles, chemicals, virus, bacteria, ants, dogs, dinosaurs, planets, stars, galaxies, and finally the known universe.
It was a well-spent $3.00
Cool.
Arthropleura - Yikes. Imagine that roaming around
"Human
A highly social, relatively hairless bipedal ape that was once a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but has adapted to create websites."
Let me recommend "On Size and Life" by McMahon & Bonner
The escalating sizes of things contrast with the constancy of the complexity needed to bring them into being. Something somehow created the energy and matter that created the rules of physics, which created the rules of chemistry, which created the rules of biology, which brought consciousness, which brought self awareness, which brought language, which brought civilization. I wonder what civilization will bring us. And what was the something that started it all?
I appreciate there was a banana for scale.
Ampersand - Indeed. Don't forget the beauty and brilliance of math.
Nice- most of them are at my house right now…
I was hoping Sydney Sweeney's were being compared to those of other similar life forms.
Very nice. I am fascinated with the tardigrade.
House Mouse
An extremely compressible rodent, able to squeeze its body and slip through holes smaller than a dime.
I bet you say that to all the rodents.
That little chameleon looks so sad...presumably because it can't change color...which kind of defeats the purpose of being a chameleon in the first place.
Masks are effective against The CHYna virus.
Rrrrriiight.
My penis is somewhere in there between the tiny shark and the banana.
There's a black hole thirty million times the size of our sun. It might be possible to split sub atomic particles. We just don't know how. Perhaps our cosmos is just a subatomic particle in some larger entity. I don't think my brain is capable of finding the handle on many facts.......I'm sure glad that certain species have gone extinct. Of the last 3.5 billion years or so that life has existed on earth, this is clearly not the worst time. Sad though how brief biologic age is compared to geologic and cosmic time spans.
A baby rhe size of a fetus.
The kanji 熊 (kuma), meaning “bear,” came out on top in popular voting for the kanji of the year for 2025. Powerful wild animals encroaching into human settlements were an irresistible image propelling the character past 米 (kome, “rice”) in a closely contested race.
Large bears the size of small bears.
Tardigrade! I just read Alex Riley's Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Impossible Places, which has a lot about tardigrades. Nice book, though I feel like every publisher has sent out a memo to prospective authors: "your manuscript must include a least 10% warning about climate change."
Thank you for posting this, Ann. It is beautifully done. I was fascinated by how many of the dinosaurs were depicted with feathers. They are the direct ancestors of birds, after all.
Per Grok: The largest known individual fungus is an Armillaria ostoyae (honey fungus) in Oregon's Malheur National Forest, covering about 3.5 square miles. Its estimated mass ranges from around 6,800 to 35,000 metric tons, based on calculations of its underground mycelial network density and extent.
Delightful. hey, did you see the toggle button to switch units from metric to imperial? We all need to just byte the bullet and convert to metric. Where is the boring candidate who will propose this mild, intelligent, non partisan topic.
Nice one, Ann. Sent to kids for their kids.
That was fun, I was a little miffed that they switched from metric to imperial somewhere around the 1/2 mm range.
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