“Ways to feel small” (parts one and two) was never really meant to be a series but I just keep coming across these videos that make me feel like a ten-year-old again. When I wasn’t playing hockey or Micro Machines on Nintendo, I used to read books about space (Carl Sagan or Robert Jastrow were my favourites) and sit in my bed thinking that my backyard–the half acre of forest and grass that made up my known universe at the time–might not be as big as I had previously thought.

The American Museum of Natural History has just come out with a video called “The Known Universe” (click on the link for the AMNH’s description of the video) that would have blown my ten-year-old mind. Backed by some eerie music and with everything to scale, this six-minute video takes you from the Himalayas to the edge of the observable universe and back again. The part that particularly struck me was how small a distance the first radio signals from Earth have covered (at about 2:38). They don’t  specify which radio signal they’re talking about but since radio began in earnest at the beginning of the 20th century, those radio waves couldn’t have left Earth much before then meaning that if we left Earth about 100 years ago at the speed of light, that’s how far we would have made it. (Incidentally, if you were traveling only as fast as the Apollo 10 astronauts as they re-entered the atmosphere, which is the fastest a human has ever gone, it would take you about 27,000 years to get there.)

My point with this series isn’t, as the name might imply, to make people feel insignificant but instead to make some of our problems seem insignificant…like Christmas shopping.