Big Noise

Season’s greetings, Jazz Pickles. No, it isn’t Christmastime yet—thank Santa—but it is still a season, and I greet you.Gulliver’s Travels was a favorite story of mine as a kid. I loved how it inspired me to think of the highly relative nature of size. Quite naturally, it is easy to unconsciously assume that the starting point for size is us, and that anything smaller is “small,” and anything larger is “large.” A couple of seconds is all you need to realize how misleading that can be. Compared to us, an ant is small, but compared to the Grand Canyon, we are smaller than an ant’s turd.To envision your size relative to the Earth, imagine a ball with a diameter that reaches from Seattle to Baltimore—30% larger than our moon. If it were sitting atop Kansas (it would crush everything beneath it, but that’s not the point), its equator would stretch from California to the East Coast.Now imagine the period at the end of this sentence on a ball that size, and you’ll be approximating the size of a single human relative to the Earth. That’s why, for millions of years, humans thought the Earth was flat. Where you’re standing, it doesn’t look like a globe, but even on a flat, featureless plane, ...