Thanks for this analogy, it's far more enlightening than the human hair version.

Interesting. I have precisely zero intuition for the scale of five atoms!

How many football fields is that?

The size of a football 27,000,000 football fields away.

Let’s just round to 0.

Smaller than kickoff dot.

American or European?

Or the thickness of a human hair at 500km (from the article)

Yes, but I did not use that one as I don't like that visualization. My reptilian brain made that sound way bigger than it actually is. As the horizon is only 5-10km away, I cannot really estimate a distance of 500km. I can see the problem of measuring 5 atoms height at arms length though, even when I cannot imagine the size of an atom.

Black holes are small things. They're just very heavy.

Messier 87* has a Schwarzschild radius of ~17.784 light hours. The scale of the universe is enough that the mother of my ex had a panic attack when watching a YouTube video about things much smaller than that — hypergiant stars.

Funny enough: two of my lay friends had panic attacks when i described to them the distance to the nearest black hole.

What was the cause of the panic attack?

From what I understood, the realisation that the Earth, that everything and everyone she’d ever known, was an invisible speck next to an invisible speck compared to the largest star.

Ahh yes, the Total Perspective Vortex.

Some people don't react well to having their ego obliterated.

Probably the innate fear of infinity

The ISS is 'about' 500km away, that makes it fairly easy to visualise for me.

That's a good point. Perhaps we need to just use things that are well understood.

The moon is about 350,000 to 400,000 km away. By my estimate (of other people's estimate), we're looking at a spot in the sky roughly the size of a dime (US 10-cent coin) on the moon.

I think my reptilian brain understands the distance of the moon and the size of a dime.

Hmm. My inner eye can’t really get a handle on the distance to the moon. I know it’s 33 Earth-diameters away, that it’s 400 times further than my longest cycle ride, but my mind somehow keeps shortening every distance longer than I can go in a day under my own power to similar levels of “quite far”.

You can get a sense of scale from mountain landscapes or city skylines. As you get closer to the city, you get a better sense of scale and size based off of how much the city has grown or shrunk.

The moon is very far away, but it DOES grow and shrink as it comes closer and further away from us. Using the size differential, you can get an innate feel to the size of the moon. Technically speaking, just driving towards (or away from) the Moon will have you traveling closer / further away from it, and give you a sense of scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance_(astronomy)#/me...

The next time you drive to a major city or large, recognizable landscape, keep an eye on how big and small mountains (or buildings) are and how quickly they move parallax to the foreground. It really does give an instinctive sense of scale. Train this instinct well enough, and you can use it on the moon.

The trouble with driving (or trains) is that my unthinking processing treats the speed as constant and shrinks the distances. Even cycling 1080 km along the Rhine, from the North Sea to the Swiss not-quite-Alps had that foreshortening, though to a lower degree.

Black holes are normally small things. The furthest one out of these is larger than our solar system, however.

Or an orange on the moon (from a youtube video IIRC?)