Closer to the smallest thing — or the biggest?
Line up everything from the Planck length (1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ m, the smallest meaningful distance) to the observable universe (8.8 × 10²⁶ m) on one logarithmic ruler. A human turns out to sit past the midpoint — closer to the biggest end than the smallest.
Size s
drag across ~62 orders of magnitude
ℓPdrag to any size, or try a preset belowU
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The Planck length isn't the size of a real object — it's the theoretical scale at which our current physics stops making sense, used here only because it's the smallest distance anyone can meaningfully talk about. The observable universe's diameter (≈93 billion light-years) is the other fixed end. Both extremes and every object in between are placed by their order of magnitude, i.e. their base‑10 logarithm — equal steps on this ruler are equal multiples, not equal distances, which is what makes the whole range fit on one page. See also the classic orders of magnitude (length) table this page draws its reference sizes from. One honest wrinkle: the gap from the Planck length up to a single proton is already about 20 orders of magnitude — roughly a third of the entire ruler — almost all of it in a subatomic realm with nothing built at intermediate scales, so the "midpoint" this page measures against is shaped by that empty stretch as much as by anything at the large end.