Time to go back to work on the ol' FTL drive...
On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 7:31 AM, Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com> wrote: > From the Daily Grail: > > "In his wonderful fictional series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the > Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams introduced the 'Total Perspective > Vortex' - a machine built by inventor Trin Tragula, who after being > constantly nagged by his wife to "Have some sense of proportion!" > (sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day), decided to > build a machine "just to show her". Into one end, he plugged the whole > of reality (in classic Adams fashion, extrapolated from a piece of > fairy cake), and into the other he plugged his wife, so that she would > be shown in one instant "the whole infinity of creation and herself in > relation to it". To his horror, Trin Tragula realized that this > single, devastating shock had completely annihilated his wife's brain, > but to his satisfaction "he realized that he had proved conclusively > that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one > thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion". > > I don't have any fairy cake on hand, but the above video is pretty > close to being a Total Perspective Vortex: it's an accurate > 3-dimensional model and animation created out of data from the Sloan > Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), showing some 400,000 galaxies in their > actual position in the Universe. > > High resolution and full-screen recommended! Remember: each of those > points of light is a complete galaxy, each with 100 billion stars or > more within them. And in case that all doesn't blow your mind enough, > it's worth pointing out that this 3D representation only includes all > objects out to redshift 0.1 - roughly 1.3 billion light years from > Earth, about 1/10 of the distance to the edge of the known Universe. > And the perspective given in this video is actually impossible, as to > see the Universe in this way would require traveling at many times the > speed of light." > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw > > (Well worth the 1min 49 sec) > >
