Everything we can possibly see. Light from the edge has been traveling for 13.8 billion years to reach us. Beyond this? We literally cannot know.
Our home galaxy. 200-400 billion stars, including our Sun. You are here, on a planet orbiting one of those stars, two-thirds of the way from the center.
The Sun, 8 planets, and everything gravitationally bound to our star. Light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth, 4 hours to reach Neptune.
A pale blue dot. Everything every human has ever known, loved, fought over, or built exists on this thin crust wrapped around molten rock.
A self-aware arrangement of atoms, capable of contemplating the universe that created it. You are the cosmos looking back at itself.
You contain about 37 trillion of these. Each one is a city of molecular machines, reading DNA, producing proteins, burning fuel, and maintaining order against entropy.
The building block of matter. You contain 7 × 10²⁷ of these—that's 7 octillion atoms, 35,000 times more than all the stars in the observable universe.
The tiny dense core of an atom, containing almost all its mass. Protons and neutrons packed together by the strong nuclear force.
The switches that power your phone. At 3nm, we're manipulating matter just 30 atoms wide. Apple's M3 chip has 25 billion of these.
The theoretical smallest meaningful length. Below this, our physics breaks down. Space itself may be "pixelated" at this scale.
You just traveled through the entire known range of scales in the universe—from 10²⁶ meters to 10⁻³⁵ meters. And you, standing at 10⁰, are remarkably close to the middle.
This is what Pillar 1 is about. Scale isn't just size—it's a lens for understanding why things behave the way they do. Ants don't drown because of surface tension. Stars collapse because gravity wins at large scales. You exist in the sweet spot where chemistry, biology, and consciousness are possible.