Big Stuff, literally
One of my fascinations over the years, besides literally everything else that has been mentioned on my blog, is big things. I mean that literally, I like things are inconceivably large. Now where this interest came from is up in the air, but I personally think it relates to my love of space. Afterall, space has always made me want scroll out and see things on a macroscopic scale. I’ve continually had a curiosity with discovering celestial bodies that put into perspective how small humans are. See the the previous link, or example A, example B, and example C to see what some examples of what I mean. I feel that learning about objects on such a massive scale makes me appreciate the beauty of the universe, but also of life. While I enjoy the visual spectacle of space, I also enjoy that I am able to be an observer of such awe in the first place. The probability of everything leading up to me being born, and then having just the right circumstances to lead me to learning and observing space is pretty inspiring I think. Now lets talk about BIG STUFF.
The first big object I would like to talk about is Bagger 288. Now while the name sounds like ridiculous the machine/ vehicle is just as ridiculous. The mobile (although barely mobile) excavator is capable of harvesting 265,000 tons of coal daily! It weighs 13,000 tons itself, is 71 feet tall, and each of its 18 buckets is 7,700 pounds. The excavator is a beast and I highly recommend looking up pictures of the machine to truly get a scale of how large it is. Coal is of course a fossil fuel that can have negative affects and the machine itself is not without some controversy, but I do find intrigue in human ingenuity and ability to shape the world. The more wild part is that Bagger 288 was designed decades ago, who knows what the future holds in terms of making vehicles and machines. I hope that one day humans are able to create machines which rival the size of Bagger 288, but are more environmentally friendly and able to coexist with nature in a way. I know its a hopeful thought but sometimes a little hope goes a long way.
Now while being big on physical scale is the main focus of this post I would like to take a step away of from the physical reality and look at the digital, more specifically video game map sizes. As a kid I had an affinity for going to the edge of the maps in open world games. I’d like pushing the boundaries of what the developers had created in order to find new secrets and hidden worlds. I wasn’t lucky most of the time. Instead of being met with secrets I was met with bugs, invisible barriers, and the occasional teleportation back to the map. When I started playing Minecraft during my early adolescence it was a breath of fresh air to be able to go as far the eye can see and still find more land waiting to be explored. In fact Minecraft has one of the largest maps ever created (although it is procedurally generated), which spans 60 million by 60 million blocks! Now due its limitations, Minecraft originally had an area known as the far lands that ended the world which has since been replaced with an invisible barrier. Although people have pushed the lands to their limits.
Staying on fictional worlds for this one, another BIG thing that’s interested me has been the size of spaceships in fiction. Some spaceships can be very small and serve a single person or small number of people, think Jimmy Neutrons ship or Rick’s ship from Rick and Morty. Others can be slightly larger and have multiple rooms, think of the Millennium Falcon. Other spaceships are somehow even larger and are on the scale of small cities, think the ship from Wall-E. Finally you get to the true behemoths that one can only hope humans are able to develop even in the far flung future, think the Mothership from Independence Day or the Dreadnaught from Destiny. These physic defying ships, aren’t happening anytime soon but they fun to conceive of. I would like to also shout out to the rings from Halo and the Dyson Sphere from Star Trek, because although they aren’t a spaceship in the traditional sense they are somewhat in other ways. Now while, these aren’t a reality yet I still find it interesting that some creators create their worlds on such a massive scale. It makes me realize that I am not the only one dialed in on size ;).
Now lets dial back in on reality and move on. Let’s talk about cities. Now talking about cities is complicated for many reasons. For one, what constitutes a city is different depending on who you ask. So let’s just say when I mention a city I mean an urban area as opposed to a rural area. I grew up in what many would consider a small city with a population of give or take around 50,000 people. I didn’t grow up in a highly dense area with skyscrapers lining the airspace. Instead I grew up with at least 2,000 people per square mile and the ability to occasionally drive down a main street without traffic. Even in this small city it would take at least an two to five hours to walk from one side of town to the other. I still find restaurants that I had never heard of. I still find that there are entire areas I had never visited. This is in spite of my decade and a half of experience living here. Even my friends who have lived here since birth are still finding new experiences. Truly even the small city I call home is big, but now lets scale that up to the size of a truly enormous city. New York City, has a population of over 8 million, a size of 472 square miles, a GDP of over $1 trillion, and history of 400 years. Truly this city is a pinnacle of the modern world. Its culture is highly influential and diverse, its history is rich, and its quite literally the city. Think about all of the people who live there, all living their own lives, all with their own histories, and than think about over the span of centuries. The funny thing is, New York isn’t even the largest city in the world, nor is it the only one with what was previously mentioned. Cities are truly one of the biggest things human have created.