← The Little Internet Lab / 04
How Small Are You?
Tell us your height, then scroll to see what’s smaller than you, and what’s a lot bigger. Twelve stops, one fun fact each.
First, how tall are you?
You: 1.7 m
01 / 12
You
That’s you. Hi.
About 1.7 m
Shorter than a standard doorway, which is about 2 metres (6 ft 8 in).
Fun fact A typical adult is made of roughly 30 trillion human cells, and carries around about as many bacterial cells as that.
02 / 12
An ant
Tiny, but organized.
About 4 mm
You’re about 430 ants tall.
Fun fact Ants can carry things many times their own body weight, often 10 to 50 times.
03 / 12
A human hair
Barely visible. Still somehow in the drain.
About 70 µm
About 14 hairs side by side would make a millimetre.
Fun fact Hair grows roughly a centimetre a month.
04 / 12
A red blood cell
Millions of these are working in you right now.
About 7.5 µm
About nine of them fit across the width of one hair.
Fun fact Your bone marrow makes roughly two million new red blood cells every second.
05 / 12
A virus
Smaller than the cell it’s about to ruin.
About 100 nm
Roughly 75 of them could line up across one red blood cell.
Fun fact Viruses can’t reproduce on their own. They hijack a living cell to make copies, which is why many scientists don’t count them as truly alive.
The nucleus is far smaller than this dot.
06 / 12
An atom
The bottom. For this trip, anyway.
About 0.1 nm
Roughly 1,000 small atoms in a row would span one virus.
Fun fact Atoms are mostly empty space: the nucleus is roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller than the atom around it.
That’s the bottom.
Atoms are about as small as this trip goes. Now back up: past your own front door, over Everest, and out into space.
07 / 12
Mount Everest
Okay. Now the other direction.
About 8.8 km
Stack about 5,200 of you to reach the summit.
Fun fact Everest rises by a few millimetres a year as the Indian plate keeps pushing into Asia.
08 / 12
Earth
Home. Mostly ocean.
About 12,700 km
About 1,400 Mount Everests stacked up would span it.
Fun fact Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator, making it about 43 km wider there than from pole to pole.
Earth shown to scale: the tiny dot.
09 / 12
The Sun
Big, hot, and about 150 million km away.
About 1.4 million km
About 109 Earths lined up side by side.
Fun fact You could fit roughly 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun.
Size across Neptune’s orbit. Spacing not to scale.
10 / 12
The solar system
Everything you’ve ever known fits in here.
About 9 billion km
Light takes about 8 hours to cross it, from one side of Neptune’s orbit to the other.
Fun fact Voyager 1, launched in 1977, crossed into interstellar space in 2012 and is now more than 160 times farther from the Sun than Earth is.
Artist’s sketch, not to scale.
11 / 12
The Milky Way
Somewhere in here is your Wi-Fi router. Probably.
About 100,000 light-years
Light needs about 100,000 years to cross it.
Fun fact Our galaxy holds an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars, and the Sun is about 26,000 light-years from its centre.
Artist’s sketch, not to scale.
12 / 12
The observable universe
The end. As far as we can see.
About 93 billion light-years
About 900,000 Milky Ways side by side.
Fun fact It’s about 93 billion light-years across even though the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old, because space itself has been expanding.
So, how small are you?
About 17 billion times bigger than an atom, and about 520 septillion times smaller than the observable universe. Right in the middle, doing great.
All sizes are rounded and approximate. Illustrations are sketches, not to scale unfortunately.