The universe is pretty big and very strange. Hundreds of billions of galaxies with sextillions
of stars and planets and in the middle of it all there is earth, with you and us. But as enormous as the universe seems looking
up, it seems to get even larger when you start looking down. You are towering over worlds within worlds,
within worlds – each in plain sight and yet hidden from your experience. Let’s go on a journey – we’ll start
in a park, about a thousand meters long, enough for a 15 minute walk. Every time we click this magic button, we’ll
become a thousand times smaller. Please slip into this magic science suit,
so you don’t die and can still see. Ready? Let’s go. click The Miniature Realm You are the size of a grain of sand just 2
mm high, standing on a blade of grass that seems as tall as an eight storey building
to you. A square meter of lawn is now a dense metropolitan
area, with 100,000 blades, or two Manhattans worth of grass towers. From your new tiny perspective, the park that
you could quickly stroll through before, is now the size of France. Crossing it would take at least a week. Human sized humans loom over you, 4 times
taller than the Empire state building, their steps falling from horizon to horizon. A bee the size of a helicopter lands near
you, making the ground shake, as its hairy carapace vibrates with each wingbeat. You try to escape but are barely able to move
because the air is so… gooey. Before you clicked the button air resistance
was barely noticeable – but as you’re now a thousand times smaller, it is as if
the air has become a thousand times denser. It feels like you are moving through honey. Flying insects like bees use this to their
advantage. Their wings are not made for gliding but like
paddles that row through the air. Scaled up to human size, the bee would outrun
a Concorde Jet – except it couldn’t even take off because it would be too heavy for
its wings. click The Microscopic Realm You’ve entered the microscopic realm and
are now less than 2 micrometers tall, about the size of an e coli bacteria. From your new tiny perspective, the park you
started in is now a million kilometers wide to you – if you walked non stop it would
take some 25 years to cross it. It is hard to grasp just how huge the microscopic
world is to its tiny inhabitants. The giant bee that was close a moment ago,
is now the size of Mt. Everest, towering high into the sky – but
alive, humming and vibrating. The air here feels almost solid to you, on
the human scale it would be as viscous as lava, extremely hard to push through. The blade of grass now expands so far you
can’t see its edges, stretching as wide as Paris would to a regular sized human. You see valleys that look like dried up riverbeds,
dead patches like deserts and giant craters left behind by voracious aphids. But if you look closely, this is not terrain. These are rows of individual cells, each the
size of a house with hard exteriors like glass shells. Every few cells, there are huge openings called
stomata, like mouths, sucking in air and blowing out oxygen. Suddenly the gigantic bee begins to move – a
construct made of rigid pieces that slide against each other, like a suit of armor. It takes off to escape a drop of water the
size of an Asteroid, that fell from another blade of grass and is now rushing at you at
breathtaking speeds. You brace for impact but instead of feeling
a strong punch you just get sucked in. You try to swim but the water feels thick
and sticky and holds onto your limbs like glue. Air molecules are free spirits while water
molecules act more like social creatures that group together whenever possible. They pull on each other and create a relatively
strong cohesive force that traps you. You can’t help it but you are still moving,
tumbling in all directions, helplessly dragged along by an invisible current. Floating in this miniature lake are tens of
thousands of micro-organisms. They take on many forms – viruses the size
of tennis balls float around you aimlessly, others like the Euglena oxyuris cells which
pass you like freight trains. But most look like oily jellyfish the size
of a car, sporting long tentacles that act like super charged propellers. Despite the water holding onto them like glue,
some move hundreds of body lengths per second, equivalent to a person shovelling through
mud at over 600 km/h. However bacteria weigh so little and water
is so viscous that they basically have no inertia – there is no gliding on this scale. The result is a weird jerky motion that’s
hard to keep track of. Maybe we can learn more about this strange
motion if we go even deeper. click Molecule Realm You’ve become the size of a molecule, just
under two nanometers wide. At your new tiny scale, the droplet now seems
as big as the Moon to a regular human. The blade of grass it rests on could reach
from the tip of Alaska to the end of Australia, and the park is now almost the size of the
Solar System – but instead of mostly empty space, it is filled with stuff. Everywhere you look, there are innumerable
amounts of molecules and atoms. The rigid walls of the grass cells beneath
you are clearly vibrating, rippling with waves of energy. The water droplet contains nearly a sextillion
water molecules that are all in motion. Water is actually a storm of H2O molecules
smashing into each other hundreds of trillions of times a second. Each of them is moving at speeds of around
2300 km/h and bombard their surroundings mercilessly, sending small objects hurtling in all directions. This is the source of the invisible current
that you noticed when you were a thousand times larger. Scaling this speed up to the human scale is
impossible, as a human sized molecule would be 2000 times faster than the speed of light. All this furious motion comes from heat. Heat is a bit abstract at our human scale,
where you touch something and get a vague sense of whether it is hot or cold. But down here, you really feel what ‘heat’
is: the motion of molecules, vibrating, twisting and colliding as if they’re inside a furious
ballpit. When these molecules lose heat, they move
more slowly and collide less often. When they gain heat, they speed up and smash
together with renewed fervour. Temperature is basically the measure of the
average speed of these fantastic dancers performing all day. Suddenly a molecule hits you especially hard
and you are catapulted out of the water droplet into the air again. And here you see something unexpected: The
stuff between the air molecules: Nothing. Between the molecules that make up the air
there is a vacuum. On average a molecule in the air travels for
about 60 nanometers, which is about the length of a hockey rink if it were the size of a
human. If we were to compress all the molecules and
atoms buzzing around in the room you are watching this in, they would only fill about 0.1% of
its volume. 99.9% of the space around you is a vacuum,
you just don’t notice it. Which also means that every time you take
a breath, you breathe in mostly nothing with a few atoms. Click Subatomic Realm At your size of under 2 picometers, scale
starts to lose its meaning. A human would be nearly 2 billion kilometers
tall relative to you, so large they could stretch their arms from the Sun to Saturn. An atomic nucleus would be the size of a grain
of sand you could hold on the tip of your finger. That grain holds 99.97% of the atom’s mass. The rest, a sphere of influence about as large
as the Eiffel tower from your perspective, is filled with an electron cloud. That’s basically all the places where electrons
might be at any given moment in time. Electrons are shapeshifters that morph around
outside a nucleus, creating a new and vibrating mess of different shapes with every new moment. Unlike the graceful motion of planets, the
atomic nuclei are chaotic blurs. They bulge, roll, quiver and breathe. They hold back the same energy that powers
nuclear bombs and it doesn’t let them sit still.. They twist and vibrate sextillions of times
a second. It is time to end our journey and return to… click What are you doing? click Stop it! click, click, click, click, click, click,
click…. The Smallest Place (?) We have reached the bottom, the border between
reality and unreality. The scale here is the Planck length, which
is the distance light travels in a Planck Time. Planck time is the time it takes light to
travel a Planck length. Ah ok. None of our models of the universe make sense
at scales smaller than this, so for now, this is it. Sad click :( We think that down here, particles bubble
into existence and then spontaneously disappear, creating a quantum foam of unimaginable energy. Can we go even smaller? We don’t know. It is time to return. If you look up, the universe is large and
strange. So incredibly large and strange. But if you look down, into the tiny and extremely
tiny, the universe seems even larger, and even stranger. In the end, the perfect place might be where
you are right now – not too big, not too small. I’m ready. We did it! It worked. Right under our noses there is so much hidden
that we never get to see with our own eyes – entire realms of bizarre structures and
outlandish creatures. What a magical place this is. A forest of slime molds, single cell organisms
that work together and form fungus-like structures. But we don't have time to hang out with these
calm fellows any longer. Psssst! Now we’re in the kingdom of the mighty tardigrades
– don’t disturb them in their death-like slumber. Don’t worry though, they will wake up once
the conditions are less rough. Oof, didn’t mean to get in the way! Your cells are hustling to keep you alive,
coordinating myriads of proteins. This might be the weirdest place yet, with
no up or down. There’s way too much going on – better
move on. Now we are inside one of the parts that allow
you to watch this video. The structure of a microchip is so small,
it nearly breaks the rules of the quantum realm. – Wait, something is happening! These hidden worlds are all part of our 12,023
Human Era Calendar. This time you can join us on a journey through
the microcosm. With each turn of the page you will reveal
a new world you didn’t know existed right beneath your feet. You know the drill by now: as always it’s
a super high-quality calendar, very shiny and – only available for a short time. We also have a few special deals for you in
our shop. The calendar is a true piece of kurzgesagt
you can take home with you. And we say this every year but it’s true:
every calendar purchase directly supports what we do here at kurzgesagt. And that’s not just creating videos but
– sparking curiosity all around the world. So because of you, we can spread knowledge
and ignite an appreciation for space, nature and life in people everywhere. Thank you so much for making this possible! Have a wonderful 12,023! See you down in January!
What's that about particles bubbling into existence and quantum foam of unimaginable energy?
It had never occurred to me that bug wings are trying to row through air because it's like a liquid to them.
They changed their mini suit to "W" for wumbo to get bigger.
I really wish the year 12,023 would catch on.
Does this work in the opposite way too? Like if you got bigger and bigger would you see different worlds? Are we the subatomic particles to some larger being?!
Did they do a video about some extreme planets? Like raining diamonds or Ice-VII or something. I would really be interested in a video like that.