Name: You Are The Center of The Universe (Literally)
Uploaded: 2026-01-20T17:26:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A three story building is about 10 metres tall, six times bigger than you.

In the opposite direction, six times smaller than you.

You get things like a cute squirrel, about 27 centimeters small.

So the building is just as big relative to you as you are to a squirrel.

In fact, you are in the middle of everything in the universe.

Let's go on a fantastical journey together to the small and the large and see if it's true.

The Rufus hummingbird is around 7 centimeters.

Both of these flyers are 23 times bigger or smaller than you, and both fly intercontinental distances.

The tiny bird migrates between Alaska and Mexico.

If the hummingbird were the same size as the jet, it would circle the Earth 85 times every year.

Deinoponera, the largest ant in the world, is about 55 times smaller than you.

Their small colonies have around 100 individuals, but no queens.

Instead, they ruthlessly compete for status within the nest, which can reach 1.2 meters deep.

If humans lived like Dinoponera, we'd be building towers of over 25 stories filled with offices and ruthlessly competing for status.

The deadliest and most annoying insect in the world is the mosquito.

While on the other end, the Empire State Building is about that much larger than you.

Kind of unimaginable how something this small creates so much devastation for something that big.

We're getting to the borders of human perception now.

Like coarse grains of sand, about 3 millimeters, 550 times smaller than you.

You can feel their shape and roughness between your fingers.

And if you focus, see them individually, we mix them into concrete that can hold up the tallest towers ever built.

Like the 828 meter tall Burj Khalifa that's 500 times larger than you.

If you were that tall, people would be as small to you as grains of sand in your hand.

Anything smaller or bigger and it becomes hard to grasp.

A medium sized city like lisbon is about 6,000 times larger than yourself and permeated by a network of highways, roads and alleys.

On the other end, about 6,000 times smaller than you.

Are your small arteries permeating your whole body.

Actually, you're in the middle, between your network of blood vessels and the network of a city like Lisbon.

If you think of a city as a living being, you find more and more parallels.

A small alley is as small to the city as an arteriole.

Your tiniest capillaries are to you what the pipes bringing water to homes are to lisbon.

Going further, 100,000 times smaller than you, we reach a typical skin cell about 30 micrometers in diameter.

And one of your red blood cells is merely 7 micrometers.

They are as small to you as as you are to the entire Tokyo metropolitan area, the largest urban area in the world, spanning over 160km.

You are so incredibly big, filled with so much complexity, so many different moving parts.

Or are you just a cell in the human civilization's superstructure?

Germany is around 875km from north to south, and the fourth biggest agricultural exporter in the world.

Rhizobia is a nitrogen fixing bacteria up to 3 micrometers long.

And without it, that sort of agricultural production is impossible.

So we have a country and a bacterium depending on each other.

And you are in the middle, both being roughly 550,000 times larger or smaller than you.

It's about 12,700 kilometers in diameter, about 7.7 billion times larger than you.

On the other side of the scale is corny bacterium, as little as 0.3 micrometers across, living on your skin and eyes, along with 100 billion other bacteria, more than 10 times more than there are humans on Earth.

Again, you're in the center, right in the middle of something so large that our civilization is a mere scratch on its surface.

And something so small and numerous you never notice its presence, even as it touches you.

From here on out, your brain is braking a bit.

Four times wider than Earth is Neptune, a cold Blue gas giant, 49,500 km wide.

The largest planet, though, is Jupiter, 140,000 km in diameter.

A titanic abyss shrouded in terrible winds.

You could drop Earth whole into its depths and it would soon simply vanish.

On the opposite scale, we find the deadly West Nile virus, 50 nanometers in diameter, or one step down.

The spike proteins on a coronavirus that open up cells for its RNA payload.

They are as small to you as you are to the planet Jupiter.

You are in the middle between gigantic planets and the world of viruses.

These tiny things, so deadly, let that sink in.

A tiny virus is taking over and killing lung cells up to 500 times larger than itself, with the help of a tiny protein weapon.

That's like you trying to kill a giant the size of The Burj Khalifa with a screwdriver.

But the real boss of the solar system is the sun.

10 times bigger than Jupiter, a billion times larger than you, Controlling all the planets and and source of all energy that drives life.

Clearly the boss of our body is a DNA strand containing all the information making your life possible.

You're right in the middle between the most important factors keeping everything alive.

From here on, things just kind of stop making sense.

But now everything just seems to mean a lot.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A is 14.5 billion times bigger than you.

A hydrogen atom is 15.5 billion times smaller than you.

But the thing is, we're not even close to being done and it's not impossible to get at least a sense of how these scale.

The solar system is 22 trillion times larger than you.

On the other end of the scale is the wavelength of low energy neutrinos released from fusion reactions in our sun.

About 100 trillion of them are passing through you every single, single second like ghosts.

A trillion times smaller than you, basically never hitting any of the particles inside you.

If you moved through the solar system in a straight line, you probably wouldn't hit anything either.

Although things are beginning to get really weird now.

A single proton at the heart of the hydrogen atom is almost exactly 1, quadrillion times smaller than you.

If the proton were as big as you, the hydrogen atoms would be taller than 12 Mount Everests.

On the other end, we meet something that just breaks human brains.

We just have no reference for these distances at all.

The distance to the closest star to Earth, Alpha Centauri, is not 1,000,000,000,000 times in the other direction from the tiny proton.

But 24, quadrillion space is just so large, it's kind of mean.

A quintillion times smaller than you is the strange world of the quarks.

The proton is not actually like a tiny ball, but

kind of just a ripple on the surface of the ocean of quarks.

Every moment, countless quarks pop into existence along with their antiparticle enemies, before doing furious battle and annihilating each other in an instant.

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You Are The Center of The Universe (Literally)

scale

impact

bacteria

protein