I like this visualization, but it got me thinking about how we often portray the universe in media. It seems like we always end up with the same message: 'Look how small and insignificant we are.' It's like we're drawn to the idea that our existence is just a tiny blip on the universe's radar.I think this perspective is a bit one-dimensional. It seems almost nihilistic.
Why does it zoom the wrong way around? Scrolling up means "zoom in" not "zoom out".
I dunno, it works just fine with my intuition — which is that you're not zooming as such; rather, by swiping up / scrolling the page down, you're moving a camera "forward" / "deeper in", toward the stars at the centermost part of the cube. The UI then reacts by re-framing (zooming) to capture and center in the view frustum, the volume of space that's between you and that centermost point.
I think early versions of Google Earth (predating pinch-to-zoom) worked this way, too? In that scrolling "down" meant descending from space "down" to Earth — and thus zooming in.
If you go on Google Maps today, it works correctly - scrolling up zooms in.
There is no reason other than conventions to call this choice the "proper" one though, is it?
Scrolling the wheel up makes my view of a webpage go up.
Scrolling the wheel up makes the part of the wheel I'm touching go forward (toward my computer screen). It thus makes sense by analogy with my first sentence that scrolling up would make the view go forward. Zooming in is similar to making the view go forward.
Zooming in is similar to making the view go forward.
Consider a timeline or history, which is usually thought of in terms of having an axis with endpoints "beginning" and "end", and navigation directions "backward" and "forward."
If you were to bind a chorded hybrid gesture (e.g. WheelUp/WheelDown while holding Control) to act as accelerators for going forward and back through your browser history — which direction would you expect to take you "forward" in time, and which direction would you expect to take you "back" in time? Personally, I'd expect down to be "forward" and up to be "back", because it lines up in a hierarchical sense with the timeline of reading and scrolling an individual page. You always end up scrolled to the top (i.e. the beginning) of a new page after navigating; and if you finish reading a page, you're at the bottom (i.e. the end) of the page. Because of this, in a browser with a hypothetical infinite-canvas model for history navigation[1], the destination page for each navigation would probably be laid out below the source page, such that you'd get back to the page you were on before navigating (i.e. "go back") by scrolling up past the beginning of the destination page you landed on. And likewise for scrolling down past the end of the source page, to take you forward again. (Or to navigate you to a <link rel="next"> page!)
[1] Really, you'd want to model this as links "unfurling" the new page in a way that slices the source page apart at the vertical position of the link, inserting the new page right below the link, before resuming the source page. This would mean that scrolling up would take you back to your recent-most scroll position within the source page. (But it would also mean that scrolling back down, would present a fork in the timeline: did you want to "down" as in down past the unfurled next page, or did you want to go "down" as in forward in history at the point of navigation?)
This "spatial model of time" — the model of "you're on a journey with no set destination, and you proceed 'forward in time' with each step forward into the unknown, but at any time can 'back up' in time [and thus in space] to where you were before you took that step" — is very common. It's the "spatial model of time" of an append-only log file; of a text adventure game; of a written diary; of those fancy Apple product landing pages where scrolling acts as a time-scrubber for an animation.
Compare/contrast: the timeline view in macOS Time Machine (e.g. https://help.apple.com/assets/65A8106E7C69B635140E606E/65A81...). Here, going "up" does take you "deeper" — but that's because the spatial model here is that you start at the latest version, at the "end" of the timeline, which is also the most "shallow" place; and you're "diving deeper" into history by going backward in time — which is both "upward" in a vertically-laid-out linear timeline, but also "forward and inward" in the spatial model.
This is a different "spatial model of time" — it's a model of "historical time as an investigation, where you start in the present, looking further back with each step you take forward, until you reach the earliest time, which is a terminal point you cannot pass." This model is not common in HCI, but rather is very case-specific.
If you consider the user story of someone exploring a 3D space as a "spatial model of time" — then you would expect it to be an "unbounded journey forward in arbitrary direction by steps"; not an "investigation that retraces a history step-by-step to a terminal origin point." You would expect that the "entry point" to the 3D space is equivalent to the top of a webpage, or the start of a timeline.
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That being said — if you replace the scroll-wheel with a flight stick, then it becomes seemingly natural that "up means dive", because that's what planes do. But even that's a corruption — before control sticks, there were only control yokes; and yokes have an actual Z input axis. You push the yoke deeper into the cockpit, away from yourself to dive; and you pull the yoke back toward yourself to climb.
The mapping of a control yoke's literal "make the yoke be further away from you" to a stick's "tilt upward" [where, therefore, the tip of the stick is further away from you] may seem principled, but it's entirely arbitrary; they could have just as well followed a different line of logic, and had control sticks interpret "tilt down" as "tilt the nose of the plane down, i.e. dive." (Both yokes and sticks were designed originally to operate with direct mechanical linkage. So there was no choice for how the yoke needed to work — the Z axis is the only axis of a yoke that you can push/pull on, and you need to be pulling on something to cause the linkage to in turn pull on the tips of the elevators. [Think bicycle brakes.] But a tilt in any direction on a flight stick can be made to generate "pulling" force away from center — and so any tilt-direction of a stick could have been mechanically linked to pulling on the elevators.)
And that's why so many people think inverted-Y-axis viewpoint controls are dumb. Even when planes did it, it was for no good reason :)
Scrolling the wheel up makes my view of a webpage go up.
That's not universal though.
Surely 'going forward' would be scrolling down a webpage? So by that thinking it would make sense for scrolling down to be zooming in. You could also see it like pulling the thing closer towards you.
(Very difficult to unlearn though, I'm not in any hurry for zoom-in to be anything other than scroll-'up'!)
That's not out of any spatial analogy, but rather because many apps interpret mouse-wheel movement (perhaps chorded with some modifier key) as controlling some number, where up means "make number go up" and down means "make number go down."
VLC, for example, puts volume on the scroll wheel, such that "up" means "volume goes up."
In fact, even Operating Systems themselves do this: if you can find a program with an OS-native number-picker control — the old-school kind with the little up and down arrows on the right of it — then if you have said control focused, WheelUp will increase the value, and WheelDown will decrease it.
IE6 decided that it — and all browsers coming after it — should do the following: Ctrl+WheelUp means "page elements get bigger", while Ctrl+WheelDown means "page elements get smaller."
Note that while this gesture (also accessible as Alt-Plus/Alt-Minus) was called "zoom" in IE6 and onward, it was never meant to be spatial zoom — the page isn't getting closer to you; you're not shrinking the viewport relative to the page; you don't get scrollbars where you didn't have them before. Rather, this gesture is literally increasing the base font-size: the page elements are growing — and then being reflowed, as fewer of them now fit inline in the viewport. So the mouse wheel here is controlling content size. Ctrl+WheelUp here means "content size up." It's an accessibility shortcut, basically.
Google Maps — released not long after IE6, and long before the first browser (Mobile Safari) shipped with spatial-metaphor zoom — decided to just "extend the metaphor" of the browser it was operating within.
Google presumed that users would try the browser's "change the content size" shortcuts. They presumed that users would presume that if you "blew up" the map by increasing the content size, then the webapp would somehow be able to notice that and respond by re-rendering the content at a higher zoom level instead.
If they could have, Google likely would have directly overridden the accessibility "content size" shortcuts (which are pretty useless on a mapping app) and mapped instead them to zooming the content. But because browsers have no API for overriding browser-chrome accelerators on a per-tab basis, the best they could do instead was to make analogous shortcuts: just as Ctrl+WheelUp increases the content size, plain old WheelUp in Google Maps increases the map view zoom as if to increase the content size.
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Google Earth — released a few years later — also uses WheelUp to mean "descend"... but for an entirely different reason.
Google Earth, with its various navigation tools, uses cursor-key UpArrow, and also "click and drag the viewport upward", both to mean "zoom in" / "descend toward Earth." It's pretty natural-feeling in context.
Google Earth is always showing you a tilted view of the Earth, with the view curving away to the horizon when zoomed in, or on a tangent to the atmosphere when zoomed out. In either case, the Earth's surface is always aligned with the bottom of the viewport – and so going inward is always the same as going downward, toward the Earth.
WheelUp is "zoom in" here by analogy to the other uses of "up" to mean "descend." They're all unified in meaning "grab the stuff in the viewport and move it up, such that the camera moves down."
But note that this UX was also designed before inverted-scroll touchpads. The "click and drag upward to descend" gesture has exactly the same intuition behind it as double-tap-dragging upward does on an inverted-scroll touchpad.
As such, presumably, had Google Earth been designed today, they'd likely have made WheelDown descend — as that would have resulted in the correct touchpad gesture (swiping up with two fingers to descend), rather than an inverted one (where you must swipe downward with two fingers to descend.)
But then again, nobody with an inverted-scroll touchpad is swiping to zoom; they're pinching to zoom. So maybe they'd have left swipe-to-zoom the way it is, so that it would still make sense for people zooming with a mouse wheel.
Well, if you use pinch or spread gestures, they are also reversed, so it is indeed getting it back to front compared to some default.
That makes sense to me I think! In things going back as far as command and conquer, mousewheel up zooms in, and mousewheel down zooms out.
But here wheel up zooms out!
Wheel does nothing at all for me in Firefox, I have to drag the bar.
There was no zoom in Command & Conquer (1995) :p
It also gets pinch and spread gestures back to front, so it seems someone just got a sign wrong somewhere.
Yeah I had this same problem. Could be because of my experience playing space sims.
Great visualization, though (ironically, as one of the first Chrome experiments) the music no longer works on Chrome by default (go to site settings > sound and set it to "Allow" to hear it), and it is somewhat outdated now (for example, it states that no exoplanets have been discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri (and that the 'proposed' JWST is required to find these planets)).
When I first went to Josemar bank as a kid there was a display talking about how exploits may theoretically exist. This would have been early 1990s.
I went a few years ago with my kids, about the same age I was, and they had a counter which was in the thousands.
Did you mean "exoplanets" not "exploits"? That's my best guess, but I have no idea what "Josemar bank" is (another typo? Did you mean to name some kind of science museum, maybe?) which makes it hard to tell.
I think they meant Jodrell Bank,a radio telescope with an astronomy based visitors centre in Cheshire in the uk
Thanks!. Figured it was something like that, but Google and Wikipedia were no help.
It's an interesting name for a telescope. What does "Bank" mean in this context? The Wikipedia article links to another telescope, the "Green Bank", but that one just appears to be named after the town it's in, which doesn't seem to be the case for Jodrell Bank.
Edit: Nevermind, the Wikipedia page does have the answer. "It is named from a nearby rise in the ground, Jodrell Bank, which was named after William Jauderell, an archer whose descendants lived at the mansion that is now Terra Nova School.
Yes, post Eurovision posting from a phone leads to devastating typos
I miss playing Elite Dangerous
I love the concept of ED and spent many an hour exploring. But when you have a full size galaxy, everything gets fairly repetitive after a while.
I had a lot of hope for KSP2 and everything that was on the roadmap. Nowhere near a galaxy scale, but much more realistic combined with having to build all of the infrastructure to reach the nearest star. Maybe one day we'll get a game that delivers without being shut down.
For those like me who were wondering, it seems that the game studio in charge of Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2 above) has announced it will be shuttered down [0]. This is a few days old.
[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-shutters-kerbal-space-...
It worked beautifully on Linux and then an update broke it!
I thought a project on GitHub reached 100k stars… I need to touch more grass.
Came here to say that. The stars on this site looks cool tho.
I did too.
I saw "Chrome experiments" and "100k stars" and figured it was about some popular feature that Google was dragging their heels on like JPEG XL.
What tools or techniques do you think the developers used to build this ?
Probably something like threejs. Some custom shaders maybe.
Threejs indeed https://web.dev/case-studies/100000stars
Why can't cookies be rejected?
Because you're supposed to use Firefox with a plugin like uMatrix or NoScript to block cookies regardless of the website's "legitimate" practices. Protip: 90%+ of websites work great without cookies.
And, you can do other things like... block scripts from phishy domains like google.com.
Last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30850625 (81 comments)
Still crazy after all these years... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4784821
Perhaps update the title with (2012)?
Curious -- how do we get information about the thickness/shape of the galactic plane from observations within the plane?
A whole bunch of assumptions, mostly of the form “what other things look like from far away is probably what we look like from far away”. And “there probably isn’t anything that makes our perspective different from others”. We can’t test these, of course. But people are happy to assume them because without that there isn’t a field.
This is really impressive. It's not important, but I kinda wish the constellations could be optionally overlaid onto the visualization somehow.
They largely wouldn’t translate to the pseudo-3d space… Constellations are a side-effect of the night sky being functionally 2D from our cosmically-speaking singular viewpoint.
Enjoyed playing around the visualization to get a better mental picture of Earth's neighborhood. it's mind-blowing to know that there are 200 to 400 billion stars just in our galaxy alone. And it's even more breath-taking to comprehend that our galaxy is but one of a ≥100 billion galaxies in the _observable_ universe.
So about 4 × 10^22 stars in the observable universe, then?
A huge number compared to the number of values that can be stored in a 64-bit integer (1.8 × 10^19).
But a tiny number compared to the number of atoms in a human body (7 × 10^27).
This seems to be totally incorrect as the constellations are completely unrecognizable.
From what I can tell, Earth is not the POV.
Where does the data come from for this? The Gaia satellite database?
It might be the hygdata set which can be found here: https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database
It currently says it has the "Hipparcos-Yale-Gliese" database, with 119,614 stars and the "Tycho-2/Gaia" subset with 118,971 stars. That seems pretty close to the numbers quoted in the demo.
I used it previously for a matrix math conversion project translating the NIST JAMA library into a Javascript library.
If interested, the test page as a githack link can be found here. Click the "Run 3D Ellipse Fitting on Nearby (100 LY) Stellar Data". My example only uses the 25,000 out to 100 LY.
https://rawcdn.githack.com/conceptualGabrielPutnam/JAMA4JS/2...
Holy shit, this is incredible. Thanks for making it!
This is great! One request would be for the smoothing when zoomed out to not generate square pixels.
Example: https://imgur.com/a/lRrHHTJ
Looks cool, but scroll wheel isn't doing anything.
Very nice simulation, the only snag is when rendering on iPhone, the stop/skip button cover some of the text
Isn't the sun's name sol?
There's one direction in which I see one very bright glare. What is special about it?
Seems awesome, but unfortunately a bit glitchy on mobile. It'll pop open info panels even when I just mean to pan and I've not found a way to leave the info panels without a reload.
There is such immense stored power in the universe, yet humans are struggling to harness even a tickle of the suns power via solar panels. Put into perspective of our galaxy, there is hardly no power difference between us and ants. Wild!
Didn’t manage to close the cookie banner before the intro started playing on top of it on my mobile screen. Great “experiment”, Google.
This is pretty old, I think those are the webgl demos for Chrome back then.
Very well made in terms of visualizing scale. Scroll not working on Firefox (Windows).
It’s actually comforting to non-believers in a way that religion is to believers. Except it has the benefit of being obviously true.
https://www.oliverburkeman.com/nobigdeal
Technically true, but non-comprehensive / reductionist, and arguably misinformative.
Also: religion is technically also "obviously" true, though what is "true" is a function of one's frame of reference.
Go on, then, I'll bite - how is it misinformative to state that the scope of all human existence occupies only a vanishingly-small fraction of the physical space, or temporal lifespan, of the universe?
I'm not even gonna touch that one :P
Because statements about how things are always boil back to a faith-based statement at some point.
Eg, all the evidence we see is completely consistent with an infinitely creative human-shaped god sitting in a 2m-by-2m universe who has turned themselves into a brain-in-a-jar and purposefully limited their consciousness to entertain themselves. With that interpretation "we" are not only the most important thing in the universe but also could reasonably argue that in reality we occupy a significant fraction of it.
Now I personally agree with the Occam's razor view that what we see is what we get, but every interpretation has to admit there are gaping holes at the foundation of any belief where the answer is "we don't know, we're just making assumptions that seem obviously true". Just because something is held to be most consistent with the currently available evidence isn't really enough to claim it is true, because it isn't obviously true to me that our evidence-gathering is uncovering important aspects about the nature of the universe. We're just doing our best - that might not be good enough. Evolution certainly isn't optimised to work out the truth, otherwise intelligence would be more usual instead of crab-shaped things.
What's true is determined by the scientific method. You can make as many theories as you want but if you can't make predictions based on that theory and devise experiments to verify those predictions, and perhaps most importantly, be open to abandoning your theory when even a single one of those experiments doesn't pan out, all you have done is shot an arrow in the dark and claimed it could have hit the target. Yes, but that information is nearly useless, and definitely can't be put on the same pedestal as someone providing actual evidence that the arrow missed the target.
There are a few issues with that position:
1) "What's true is determined by the scientific method" is, in fact, an axiom based on the old "obviously true" assumption.
2) There is thus far no evidence that the scientific method can deduce what the universe is and why it came into being. So according to the scientific method, we should probably be concluding that the truth isn't determined by the scientific method. It is a window into a fairly small subset of the truth.
3) We don't use the scientific method in court cases, we use standards of evidence and reasonableness tests. So when it matters what the truth is we don't use science (and, indeed, probably could not because it is too limited to achieve fairness).
1. The scientific method is a way to rank all the available theories that has proven remarkably useful in practice. There is no presumption in the scientific method. It's the right way only because any other way is chaotic and doesn't lead to a single answer (shooting arrows in the dark).
2. To unseat the scientific method would require a method with even more usefulness and consistent and proven track record. There is no other such method.
3. Courts are responsible for application of human law (which is completely different from an exploration of what is true). Would you be able to determine the laws of gravity in a court of law? Does that even make sense?
Right, any system of belief (yours included) boils down to axioms that have to be either accepted or rejected without evidence.
I've thought many times in the past that we'd all do best if we could choose our system of belief based on how well seeing "through" it makes sense of things. But too often that sense of "how well" is subjective and so prone to being misguided based on things as small as what we had for breakfast. And it's exceedingly hard to see through the eyes of a true believer in another "faith" in the first place.
Even so, a deep-seated personal commitment to discover and submit oneself to truth in good faith, no matter where honest inquiry leads, can go a very long way.
I think a simple touché would've been enough, you both made valid points.
What if your guess is wrong though? What if running a planet where even the smart people are this bad at thinking is actually a gigantic risk?
Take climate change for example: have you seen any signs in these forum discussions of anyone with any novel thinking or even curiosity substantially beyond some variation of "trust the science/experts + democracy" on the matter? What if simplistic, faith based thinking like that is 50% underpowered, or even more?
And climate change is just one problem.
Physical space is only one way to measure things.
Humans might account for materially all of the conscious experience the universe has ever known.
As anyone who has had to fly economy knows, physical space is very important to our lived experience.
Besides, "other things are also important" is not an argument for why "universe much bigger than you" is misinformation.
It isn't nihilistic. It is a simple fact.
As an aside, if you have not yet listened to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy radio plays (and you should!) you will know this is a major plot device.
It is a simple fact that the Earth and solar system are small relative to the universe, because everyone agrees on how to measure dimensions and volumes. It is not as simple a fact that something more large is more significant -- whatever that means (if we knew what it meant, this claim would be settled).
Physical size is such a universal metaphor for relevance/significance (eg, "it's a big deal", "it's a small matter") that they're implicitly treated as synonymous.
This is a good point. It’s an over-hang from the belief systems that came before us.
There is a well defined meaning of "insignificant" in this context: none of our activities have any material impact on what we see beyond the confines on Earth.
So the precise claim is that to describe any interplanetary scale (or up) process you can completely neglect humanity in its entirely, because its contribution to the process is negligible.
You are right that there's an unspoken step from "too small to impact the sun in any important way" to "insignificant to the universe", but it is not actually a very large step: being unable to affect one's surroundings is a classic sign of powerlessness.
You can look at it the other way. Compared to qubits, were fucking gods.
We're the middle child of the universe.
How does one measure significance? Science? Logic? Common sense? What's obvious? Some stories?
We’re Mostly harmless. We’re significant enough to have a researcher double the length of our entry in space-Wikipedia.
It depends - that may be the takeaway that's meant to be taken away, but it's almost always "look how much we're loved" from my frame of reference.