Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: Infographic

Putting the Cosmos into Perspective: Infographic Explanation

              For my infographic, I decided to try to represent the idea of how large the cosmos is. This is one of the major themes of the book, and toward the end, Tyson attempts to describe our place in the cosmos. One of his main points is about humans’ idea of importance. When he talks about a professor that had reached out to him describing how intimidating the cosmos is, he said, “his ego was unjustifiably big to begin with, inflated by the delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe” (199). While it may seem like a shot at the professor, Tyson is making a statement about the human race. Many people think the world revolves around them, and many wars are fought thinking that they are important. Tyson seeks to show that in the scale of the universe, nothing really matters. This is both scary and assuring to some people. My infographic seeks to organize some ideas of how big the cosmos is into a quick visual.

            Since throughout the book he describes the cosmos as being about both space and time, I decided to include scales of both of these measurements. For the calendar, I decided to portray the idea of the cosmic calendar. This was a calendar created by scientists who wanted to better represent when certain events occurred and how long they were. When talking about history, we usually discuss human history which deals in thousands of years. When talking about the history of the universe, we deal with billions, and when Tyson says, “everyone of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces with high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago” (Tyson 33), it is pretty hard to imagine how long ago this is. Thousands of years is barrable, but a billion years is a lot longer than we think. So all the events in the history of the universe were put into scale on a calendar in which the big bang is the start of New Years Day, and the present is the moment the clock strikes twelve on New Years Eve. Even this model doesn’t do complete justice, since we have no idea what came before the big bang, but this gives us the best idea. I picked out what I see as the major events in the universe. I then picked out a few important events in human history. This helps show people that although we think the universe started with us, we are brand new. This helps to show people that there is so much stuff that could’ve come before us. There could be civilizations that have been around millions of more years than us. Just think about how much more advanced they could be.

            For the cosmic ruler, and wanted to give a little look at how spread out our universe is. I first gave some basic measurement such as how far the moon and sun are. They seem very far, but in the scale of things are extremely close. While it only takes light several minutes to travels from the sun to earth, the closest other star’s light takes 4.3 years. That’s a very long distance, but what’s even crazier is that, “our pair of nearest-neighbor galaxies, 180,000 light years distant” (Tyson 63). This not only means it is so far away it can’t even be imagined, but also that what we see from that galaxy is 180,000 years in the past. Tyson expands on this idea in his book, “Light takes time to reach Earth’s observatories from the depths of space, and so you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were” (Tyson 202). So what’s happening from this closest galaxy won’t even reach us for another 180,000 years. On top of this, that is the closest galaxy, but estimates show that the universe holds anywhere from 200 billion to a couple trillion galaxies. Think about all that space in between us an some of the farthest galaxies. And to add even more to this, a lot of galaxies are moving away from us at the speed of light due to the ever-expanding universe. So one day, a couple trillion years in the future, the universe may be so spread out that there may be no galaxies for humans to observe from earth.

            For the last section of the graphic, I included a cosmic scale. This shows how big some of the objects in the universe are. First I show how big earth is, and although we think the moon is big, 50 can fit inside of earth. Then I show how small the earth is, and how over a million can fit inside the sun. It’s crazy to think how many earths that is, and it is almost impossible to imagine. Then I show that although this makes the sun seem huge, billions can fit inside of the largest known star. And there are even bigger things out there, such as the size of galaxies and black holes. Although it is almost impossible, just thinking about how big some of these things are put our place in the universe into perspective. For us, looking up at mount Everest, the biggest thing on earth, it seems to be the biggest thing of all time. But if the earth were the size of a cue ball, we couldn’t even be able to feel it, and earth would actually be almost as smooth as a cue ball.

            Overall, my infographic seeks to represent the major theme of the book using lots of cool info from the book. Although it still doesn’t do the universe justice, it helps give an idea of just how big our home is. It also leaves the question of, what else is out there if it is really this big? Is our universe it, or are there an infinite number of them (try imagining that)? My infographic seeks to continue the discussion of the universe that Tyson loves.