Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Get A Sense of Perspective

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams describes a machine called the Total Perspective Vortex. Its purpose is to drive people insane.

It does this by showing them the infinite vastness of the universe, and making them understand just how infinitesimally small they are in relation to it – the shock of which is enough to annihilate the brain of any living organism. “If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size,” Adams writes, “then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

I must be more of a masochist than I thought, because recently I’ve taken to shoving my head into the Total Perspective Vortex on purpose. 

Well, not really. I don’t have anything like the technical know-how to make such a machine. I can’t even bake fairy cakes. But I’ve found the next best thing: a Spanish YouTube channel called MetaBallStudios.

The person behind it is a 3D animator, and his specialty is size comparison videos. He takes objects and animals and fictional spaceships and groups them together, showing how they measure up. Thanks to him, I know that the number of aluminium cans consumed in a year would make a pile taller than the Eiffel Tower stacked on top of the Burj Khalifa. I know that the biggest crowds in rock concert history could fit snugly into Central Park. There’s even made a scale model of the observable universe, starting at particles smaller than neutrinos and zooming out until neutron stars seem just as tiny. 

Watching these videos is an unnerving experience. Even as they’re unfolding, I can feel the comparisons sliding off my brain like it’s coated in Teflon, as if it’s protecting me from my own curiosity lest I go mad like a Lovecraft character who caught a glimpse of an Elder God. But at the same time, it’s oddly comforting. 

Clearly, I’m not the first person to realise the value in looking around and remembering how small we are in comparison to the rest of the universe. Carl Sagan knew it when he made his Pale Blue Dot speech. Eric Idle knew it when he sang a song and convinced a woman to give up her liver. Still, given that everything around us feels like it’s balanced on a gossamer thread, it’s nice to think that creation as a whole is constant – even if we are not.

At some point, I will have to pull my head out of the Total Perspective Vortex. I will have to deal with the fact that California is on fire and the Arctic is melting and Donald Trump is President and the UK’s probably going to crash out of the European Union without a deal there’s a deadly pandemic which means I’m working from home and there’s deadlines oh God there’s so many deadlines.

But for now, I’m going to click on another video, and fade away into the cosmos. 

The title of this letter came from this song from Animaniacs, one of the funniest shows that’s ever been put on television. It’s coming back later this year, which is almost enough to excuse this entire dumpster fire of a year. Almost.