Powers of Ten

The picnic near the lake side in Chicago

is the start of a lazy afternoon early one October

We begin with a seen one meter wide

which we've used from just one meter away

Now every ten seconds we will look from ten times farther away

and our field of you will be ten times wider.

This square is ten meters wide

and in ten seconds the next square will be ten times as wide

Our picture will center on the picnickers

Even after they've been lost to sight

One hundred meters wide

The distance a man can run in ten seconds

cars crowd the highway

powerboats lie at their docks

the colorful bleachers are soldiers field

This square is kilometer a wide, one thousand meters

the distance a racing car can travel in ten seconds

We see the great city on the lake shore

Ten to the fourth meters

ten kilometers

the distance a supersonic airplane can travel in ten seconds

we see first the rounded end of lake Michigan

then the whole great lake

ten to the fifth meters

the distance and orbiting satellite covers in ten seconds

Long parades of clouds

the day's weather in the middle west

ten to the sixth a one with six zeros

a million meters

soon the earth will show as a solid sphere

we are able to see the whole earth now

just over a minute along the journey

Earth diminishes into the distance

but those background stars are so much farther away

they do not yet appear to move

a line extends at the true speed of light

in one second it half crosses the tilted orbit of the moon

now we mark a small part of the path in which the earth moves about the sun

now the orbital paths of the neighbor planets

Venus

And Mars

and Mercury

Entering our field of view is the glowing center of our solar system

the Sun

Followed by the massive outer planets

Swinging wide in their big orbits

that odd orbit belongs to Pluto

a fringe in the myriad comets too faint to see completes the solar system

ten to the fourteenth

as the solar system shrinks

to one bright point in the distance

our Sun is plainly now only one among the stars

Looking back from here we note four southern constellation still much as they appear

from the far side of the earth.

this squares ten to the sixteenth meters

one light year

not yet out to the next star

our last ten second step took us ten light years further the next will be one hundred

Our perspective changes so much in each step now

that even the background stars will appear to converge.

Last we pass the bright star Arcturus and some stars of the dipper.

Normal but quite unfamiliar stars and clouds of gas surround us.

As we traverse the milky way galaxy.

giant steps carry us into the outskirts of the galaxy

And as we pull away we begin to see the great flat spiral facing us.

The time and path we chose to leave Chicago

has brought us out of the galaxy along a course nearly perpendicular to its disk.

the two little satellite galaxies of our own or the clouds of Magellan

ten to the twenty second power

million light years

Groups of galaxies bring a new level of structure to the scene.

Glowing point are no longer single stars