This Video Will Destroy Your Sense of Scale

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Take a look at this grain of sand.

[00:00:02]To you, it's a nuisance at the beach, a tiny speck of silica.

[00:00:07]But if you held this single grain at arm's length against [music] the pitch black night sky, it would perfectly cover every single galaxy in this image.

[00:00:18]There are thousands of galaxies in this one tiny patch of nothingness, trillions of suns.

[00:00:26]But we aren't ready for that scale yet.

[00:00:29]To understand the void, we have to start at home.

[00:00:39]We begin here.

[00:00:42]Earth, 8,000 miles wide.

[00:00:45]It feels infinite when you're standing on it. But as we pull back, past the clouds, past [music] the satellites, we realize we are living on a fragile blue marble.

[00:00:57]Our only neighbor, the moon, is 238,000 miles away.

[00:01:03]You could fit every single planet in our solar system in the gap between us and the moon, and still have room left over.

[00:01:13]But the moon is just a rock. [music] We are heading toward the king, Jupiter, a world so vast it [music] doesn't even have a solid surface to land on.

[00:01:25]You could fit 1,300 [music] Earths inside this sphere.

[00:01:30]If Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be a basketball.

[00:01:35]Even Jupiter is a speck compared to the anchor of our existence, the sun.

[00:01:42]A million Earths could fit inside it. It holds 99.8% of all the matter in our solar system.

[00:01:50]It is the [music] definition of large, or so we thought.

[00:01:56]This is Stephenson [music] 2-18, the largest star ever discovered. If you replaced our [music] sun with this monster, its outer edge would extend past the orbit of Saturn.

[00:02:10]It would take a light beam 9 hours to circle this star just [music] once.

[00:02:15]It takes that same light less than 15 seconds to circle [music] our sun.

[00:02:21]Space is mostly nothing.

[00:02:28]We live in the Milky Way, a spiral [music] of 400 billion stars.

[00:02:34]It would take you 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light just to [music] cross it.

[00:02:41]But in the deep universe, we are a dwarf.

[00:02:48]Meet IC 1101, the galaxy eater.

[00:02:53]It is 50 times the size of our galaxy.

[00:02:57]It doesn't have 400 billion stars, it has 100 trillion.

[00:03:04]At the center of these galaxies lie the predators, black holes.

[00:03:09]Specifically, Ton 618, a black hole with the mass of 66 billion suns.

[00:03:21]Its diameter is larger than our entire solar system 11 times over.

[00:03:26]It isn't just an object, it is a hole in the fabric of reality.

[00:03:57]>> We have moved from a grain of sand to a black hole that swallows [music] solar systems.

[00:04:05]But look closer at the map.

[00:04:07]When we pull back [music] to the furthest edge of what we can see, the universe stops looking like stars.

[00:04:14]It begins to look like a web.

[00:04:17]Filaments of light connecting [music] everything in existence.

[00:04:21]This is the Laniakea Supercluster, 100,000 galaxies.

[00:04:27]And it looks exactly [music] like the neural pathways of a human brain.

[00:04:32]Maybe we aren't [music] looking at a void.

[00:04:35]Maybe we are looking at an organism.

[00:04:37]And we are [music] just a single microscopic cell dreaming of the stars.

[00:04:44]You are here.

[00:04:46]And that is enough.

[00:04:48]If you're ready to see what lies beyond [music] the next horizon, stay with Universia.

[00:04:55]The voyage is only just beginning.