New Mars Forums

Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: That's about the size --

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970116.html]-- where you put your eyes --

*--that's about the size of it. 

This pic "haunts" me.  I did post it previously, in the "New Discoveries *3*" thread (I rarely repost anything), and debated starting a new thread just for it.  I wish I would have done that yesterday. 

Anyway, look at how "tiny" it appears.  Like a baby seahorse or something, afloat in the cosmic ocean.  And yet it's about the size of our entire Solar System! 

That's what we'd look like to others. 

Such perspectives.  It really boggles the mind, how immense the universe is...and how tiny even objects enormous to us are.  :-\ 

Does anyone remember the little jingle "That's about the size, where you put your eyes -- that's about the size of it" from children's television when you were growing up?  I can't recall which program.  It went along with a very cleverly designed cartoon, in which an object flooding your viewpoint is suddenly revealed, by "your movement," to be very tiny and you've simply shifted your focus and perception...and likewise enormous objects are rendered tiny by shifts in focus and where you are with respect to it.  It was an unfolding sequence of cartoon images demonstrating how perceptions change.

Anyway.  Baby seahorse indeed.  :-\

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)