The True Scale of Atoms

Size is relative, but at some scales, it's also irrelevant. This video is one of many we've seen that try to make the size of something we aren't familiar with, well, familiar, by scaling it to a size we can understand. That would be a scale of 670,000,000x, making an atom the size of a tennis ball. It gets weird from there.

But it also adds another dimension to the scales that make us seem either unique or random. Humanity hasn't been around that long on the cosmic time scale. We only exist in a world that has moderate temperature, gravity, and atmosphere, which is unique yet mediocre. And this video shows that we can only understand size in a narrow slot in which we and our world fits, while everything much smaller or much larger is beyond our ken. Could we be missing on other intelligent life because they are microscopic to us, or because we are microscopic to them? (via Digg)