Mindbogglingly big, infinitessimally small

”Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

That is one way to describe it. Another, more visual approach was made last year by Cary & Michael Huang at Astronomy pictrue of the day, a great resource from Nasa. Don’t you just love this visualization? There’s so much going on in it. They write:

”Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but every huge galaxy is different.”