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  • Hey there and welcome to Life Noggin.

  • You ever wonder how small we are in the universe?

  • It turns out, pretty small!

  • It would be hard to pick you out of a stadium of people, much less the over 7 billion humans that live on this planet.

  • Since the average height for a person in the US is about 1.69 meters, let's estimate

  • and say that on their tippy toes and with their hands up in the air, the average person would be about 2 meters from their toes to their fingertips.

  • That means it would take about 162 people, all stretched out, to be as tall as the Eiffel Tower, which is 324 meters high.

  • With the diameter of our nearly-spherical Earth around 12,756 kilometers,

  • it would take nearly 40 thousand Eiffel Towers standing on top of each other to be as tall as the diameter of the Earth.

  • What's pretty cool, is that we've actually had a good understanding of how small we are compared to the Earth for quite awhile!

  • That's because back around 2,000 years ago, the size of the Earth was calculated pretty

  • accurately by the geographer, poet, mathematician and man-of-many-titles known as Eratosthenes.

  • Sources differ slightly, but it seems like he was only off by about 1 to 17 percent of the actual value.

  • That's pretty impressive!

  • But that's just how small you are compared to the Earth!

  • You're even smaller if you compare yourself to the Sun.

  • While we may think the Sun is a super big ball of fire, it's actually kinda small compared to other stars in the universe.

  • There are stars a hundred times bigger.

  • Even the enormous blue star Icarus, the farthest star ever seen, is way bigger, more massive,

  • and possibly hundreds of thousands of times intrinsically brighter than the Sun!

  • According to the NASA Night Sky Network, if we shrunk our Sun down to the size of a grain of sand,

  • our Solar System would be small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

  • On this scale, the Milky Way galaxy would be about as big as North America.

  • And that's just our galaxy!

  • The Milky Way is just one of the billions of galaxies that make up our universe.

  • That means you're a super small creature, on a planet much bigger than you are,

  • traveling around in an even bigger solar system in an even bigger galaxy, which is one of the billions in the universe.

  • So yeah.

  • You're pretty tiny!

  • But hey, at least you aren't the size of one of your cells.

  • Your red blood cells, some of the smallest and most abundant ones in your body,

  • only have a diameter of about 7 or 8 micrometers, which are a thousand times smaller than a millimeter.

  • A typical ant is about 10 millimeters long, so you're red blood cells are realllllly realllllly tiny, but they're still super important to your health.

  • So next time you're feeling small, just remember, being a tiny drop in the universe

  • doesn't stop you from doing awesome and important things.

  • Huh?

  • That was a good motivational quote.

  • I should put that on my Instagram.

  • In the comment section below, i wanna learn something cool about you.

  • Thanks for being here, and thanks for watching!

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  • Curious to know what would cause planet earth to explode?

  • Check out this video!

  • This asteroid was about 9 kilometers in diameter and it hit the planet at about 64,000 kilometers per hour.

  • Even with all that force, it only carved out a chunk of Earth a few kilometers deep.

  • As always, my name is Blocko, this has been Life Noggin, don't forget to keep on thinking!

Hey there and welcome to Life Noggin.

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