You could fit the entire human race into a sugar cube — and 13 other facts...

Business Insider ^ | Aug. 23, 2016 | Ali Sundermier

[Heartlander]

The universe is a crazy place... It's full of exploding stars and immortal jellyfish and it's been kicking around for almost 14 billion years.

Here are 14 awesome facts to put it all into perspective.

If you unraveled all of the DNA in your body, it would span 34 billion miles, reaching to Pluto (2.66 billion miles away) and back ... 13 times.

Source: Business Insider

In fact, your body contains cosmic relics from the creation of the universe. Almost all of your hydrogen atoms were formed in the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

Source: PBS

And when you tune your TV between stations, a small percentage of the static you see is actually the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Source: NASA

Light from some stars takes so long to travel to our eyes that when you look at the star-speckled night sky you're actually peering deep into the past. NASA's Hubble Telescope can look as far back as 100 million years ago.

Source: NASA

Almost all of ordinary matter (99.9999999% of it) is empty space. If you took out all of the space in our atoms, the entire human race (all 7 billion of us) would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

Source: Symmetry

Many of the atoms you're made of, from the calcium in your bones to the iron in your blood, were brewed up in the heart of an exploding star billions of years ago.

Source: PBS

Forty-seven years ago, humankind took its first steps on the moon — and the bootprints will probably still be there a million years from now. That's because the moon has no atmosphere, so there's no wind or water to sweep through and erase the marks.

Source: Space.com

[SparkyBass]

Buckaroo Banzai discovered this in '84... you can drive straight through a mountain in all that empty space, as long as your oscillation overthruster is in working order (the 8th dimension)

[ctdonath2]

A more doable exercise would be putting everyone inside a box where everyone has just enough room to stand - no “event-horizon” inducing physics, nothing immediately lethal.
Worth the read: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html

[dayglored]

The Business Insider writer is a twit.

The NASA reference uses "100 million years" as just one EXAMPLE of looking back in time with the Hubble. It's hardly the limit.

Your space.com source is correct -- 13.7 Billion years, essentially back to the Big Bang, plus or minus. Well, minus. :-)

[Opinionated Blowhard]

Maybe the entire human race already is in a sugar cube that is being dropped into a cup of hot coffee.

[real saxophonist]

You win. I was trying to find that.

[Romans Nine]

“ex nihilo”

What a wonderful Creator we have! I will worship Him.

[Mr. Douglas]

I actually like to tell people that we basically don’t exist. That everything is perception and we are closer to the matrix than people realize, sans the battery part.I see the world as the equivalent of a holographic projection, but eternity with God will be much more real.

[RoosterRedux]

If that is true, why do I weight so darned much?;-)

Must be the beer.

[mad_as_he$$]

Yes.

[FredZarguna]

Matter can be converted into energy and vice versa.

True, but not part of Quantum Mechanics. The interchangeability of matter and energy is a consequence of the Special Theory of Relativity, which is not a Quantum Mechanical theory, and which predates Quantum Mechanics by about two decades.

[Scythian_Reborn]

How the Pyramid's were built

The Egyptians worshiped cats and so cats played a fundamental role in Egypt. The Egyptians took two reasonably simple laws having to do with gravity, combined them, and created a force unmatched even to this day.

* The first law was simple, toss a cat up into the air and it will always lands on it's feet. Egyptian children new this law well.

* The second law was equally simple. If you butter a piece of bread and then drop it the bread inevitably lands buttered side down.

Thus, the Egyptians combined these two laws by tying pieces of buttered bread to the backs of cats, being sure that the buttered side was facing upward on top of the cats back. They then created huge daisy chains of buttered back cats and would toss them up into the air. The gravitational force of the cat trying to land on it's feet would counter balance out the buttered bread trying to land buttered side down. Basically, a cat could hover using this technique, albeit it sideways. This lead to an incredibly stable grid of buttered back cats floating approximately 6 inches above the ground.

All that had to be done next was to load the stones onto the floating grids of buttered back cats (only needed to be lifted 6 inches). Two men could easily push along an 80 ton stone ...

[CondorFlight]

“If you took out all of the space in our atoms, the entire human race (all 7 billion of us) would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.”

Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would require a full cube all for himself.

[Dr. Sivana]

the entire human race (all 7 billion of us) would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

That's like the "two scoops of raisins" in every package of Kellogg's Raisin Bran. The scoops must be different sizes as the boxes go from snack pack,to faily size, to Sam's Club size.

As there is no defined size for a sugar cube, it can be arbitrarily large.

[Moonman62]

have to disagree. God gave us Minds that were beautiful enough to discover these things.just because there’s a God doesn’t mean we can’t discover things and explain them. Doesn’t mean there’s not a God. But it doesn’t mean we can’t discover things and know things. Your answer was adequate several thousand years ago. It isn’t now. God gave us the grace to Make advances. Not to put our heads in the sand.

...

Yes, thank you. Every one of these threads has the ignorant come out to slap each other on the back and proclaim how stupid scientists really are.

[MNDude]

“There might be as many as three sextillion stars in the universe. That’s 3 followed by 23 zeros, or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s more than all of the grains of sand on E”

Shouldn’t that be three hundred sextillion?

[stremba]

True - special relativity predicts the equivalence of mass and energy, and it was formulated before quantum mechanics.

False - conversion of mass to energy and vice-versa is not part of quantum mechanics. The modern formulation of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, requires matter/antimatter annihilation (mass converted to energy) and pair production (a process in which a sufficiently energetic photon is converted into a particle and an antiparticle - energy to mass conversion). Both are experimentally observed.

[MarchonDC09122009]

Excellent episide!

http://www.startrek.com/database_article/by-any-other-name

[FredZarguna]

In fact, your body contains cosmic relics from the creation of the universe. Almost all of your hydrogen atoms were formed in the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

Not true. Hydrogen, Helium, and some small amounts of Lithium would have come into existence around 3 minutes after the Singularity. That time period is not part of "The Big Bang." In fact, in terms of the Physics involved that time period is much, much, longer than the subsequent 13½ billion years.

Even so, the likelihood that your body (or any part of the visible universe) actually contains any hydrogen from just after the first three minutes is highly unlikely. The universe was so hot at that point that their were constant particle annihilations going on, and all of those atoms long ago got converted into radiation, back into atoms, and back into radiation many times until ~370,000 years after the Singularity.

[FredZarguna]

In fact, your body contains cosmic relics from the creation of the universe. Almost all of your hydrogen atoms were formed in the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

Not true. Hydrogen, Helium, and some small amounts of Lithium would have come into existence around 3 minutes after the Singularity. That time period is not part of "The Big Bang." In fact, in terms of the Physics involved that time period is much, much, longer than the subsequent 13½ billion years.

Even so, the likelihood that your body (or any part of the visible universe) actually contains any hydrogen from just after the first three minutes is highly unlikely. The universe was so hot at that point that their were constant particle annihilations going on, and all of those atoms long ago got converted into radiation, back into atoms, and back into radiation many times until ~370,000 years after the Singularity.

[PLMerite]

"You could fit the entire human race into a sugar cube..."

Imagine what you could fit into a twinkie: