Height
Height
Top of observable universe [Black Hat is standing on top, throwing a black kitty down.] Black Cat: Mrowl! [Map of the universe from observable universe to Earth. Each area of item is labeled. Labels left to right, up to down:] (46 billion light years up) Hubble Deep Field Objects -One billion light years- Great Attractor Antennae Galaxies (colliding) Andromeda Holy crap lots of space -One million light years- Magellanic Clouds Edge of galaxy Galactic center Crab Nebula Orion Nebula Horsehead Nebula Romulan neutral zone The Pleiades, duh! Rigel Betelgeuse Ford Prefect [Three arrows are pointing up above three lines with the following label:] -Expanding shell of radio transmissions- [Above a dotted line:] Edge of federation sector 0-0-1 Pollux Arcturus Missing WMDs Sirius Barnard's Star Alpha Centauri -One parsec- -One light year- Oort Cloud (?) Bupkis Comet which will destroy Earth in late 2063 Pioneer 10 Voyager I Eris (All hail Discordia!) Pluto (Not a planet. Neener neener.) Neptune Uranus Saturn [Two arrows point to two moons, one next to each of the planets above and below.] <-- Life --> Jupiter Asteroids Mars Venus Sun Mercury Spaceship Planet Express: Hey, a heaping bowl of salt! Spaceship Discovery One: Open the fridge door, Hal. Moon Human altitude record (Apollo 13) 2nd place: Snoop Dogg Space elevator - One of these days, promise! Geosynchronous Orbit GPS satellites Lunar lander: In retrospect, they shouldn't have sent a poet. I have no idea how to land. International Space Station Space junk -Official edge of space (100 km)- Meteors -1/10 ATM- High altitude balloons Airliners Shuttle Columbia lost -1/2 ATM- Cory Doctrow Everest Helicopters (6000 m) Cueball: Woo Python! [A vertical scale is drawn along the right side of the picture, starting at 1 km and getting progressivly smaller and smaller.] 1 km -800 m- Burj Dubai (~800 m) 500 400 Eiffel Tower (325 m) 200 Kites Great Pyramid (140 m) Pop fly Redwood (115 m) 100m Oak (20 m) A person in the oak: Hey squirrels! Tallest stilts Brachiosaur (13 m) Giraffe (8 m) [Megan and Cueball holding the kite are labeled:] Folks The observable universe, from top to bottom ~On a log scale~ Sizes are not to scale, but heights above the Earth's surface are accurate on a log scale. (That is, each step up is double the height.)

Height uses a logarithmic scale to depict the contents of the universe at progressively smaller distances from Earth (less high above the Earth), starting at the highest possible "point," the edge of the observable universe , going all the way down to the grass beneath our feet. The comic is a direct companion piece to 485: Depth , also released on a Monday the week after this one. Depth similarly uses the logarithmic scale to depict the Earth at progressively greater magnification (going "deeper" down), from Earth's surface (the grass) to the interior of a single proton.
The very top (edge) of the observable universe is described as being 46 billion light years above the Earth. The universe is "only" about 13.8 billion years old , so the cosmic background radiation that reaches the Earth today has also only traveled 13.8 billion light years. However, during that time, the universe has expanded , so the galaxies that formed from that spot where this background radiation was emitted 13.8 billion years ago would now be 46 billion light years away. This has led to many misconceptions regarding the size , the most typical being that the radius of the observable universe is "only" 13.8 billion light years. See this video, How Do You Measure the Size of the Universe? , for a great explanation of the 46 billion light years.
To the right of the text, Black Hat stands atop the comic, having just dropped a cat off the edge head first; he is clearly going to test if the cat will land on its feet, being a jerk per his usual character. It will take some time, though, before the cat reaches Earth....
As one scrolls down, the depicted distances become less compressed, until arriving at the surface of Earth, all the while approaching a 1:1 scale with real-life distances. As shown in 1162: Log Scale , if Randall didn't do this, the comic would be much, MUCH longer.
In this comic, most objects that are grounded on Earth are scaled logarithmically on the vertical axes and linearly on the horizontal axes (some are scaled linearly on both axes). Displaying objects in this manner noticeably distorts their shape; the Great Pyramid, for instance, looks not like a pyramid but like a bullet.
Outside of the Earth's atmosphere, the objects are placed at their actual distances from Earth on the log scale, but their shapes are not subjected to the logarithmic scaling of Earth objects, instead appearing as they would be seen (otherwise, round objects like the sun would appear more egg shaped, with the flatter side facing upward). However, objects are still much larger or much smaller than they would be in real life, in order to allow them to be properly seen.
In the title text, Randall muses on how the inwardly-curved sides of the Eiffel Tower might actually become perfectly straightened when subjected to this logarithmic distortion. Although it is shown to bulge in the comic proper, this may be a consequence of Randall's rough art style rather than any reflection of his beliefs. The actual shape of the Tower approximates an exponential curve , which would indeed give a straight line on a log scale, although it was actually designed by Gustave Eiffel to minimize wind resistance rather than to be mathematically exact (the design is so perfect that the amount the Tower sways in the wind is less than the amount it is distorted due to thermal expansion of the sunlit side).
All objects are sorted from bottom to top by their maximum distance from earth for objects in a solar orbit, and their current distance for others.
Top of observable universe [Black Hat is standing on top, throwing a black kitty down.] Black Cat: Mrowl! [Map of the universe from observable universe to Earth. Each area of item is labeled. Labels left to right, up to down:] (46 billion light years up) Hubble Deep Field Objects -One billion light years- Great Attractor Antennae Galaxies (colliding) Andromeda Holy crap lots of space -One million light years- Magellanic Clouds Edge of galaxy Galactic center Crab Nebula Orion Nebula Horsehead Nebula Romulan neutral zone The Pleiades, duh! Rigel Betelgeuse Ford Prefect [Three arrows are pointing up above three lines with the following label:] -Expanding shell of radio transmissions- [Above a dotted line:] Edge of federation sector 0-0-1 Pollux Arcturus Missing WMDs Sirius Barnard's Star Alpha Centauri -One parsec- -One light year- Oort Cloud (?) Bupkis Comet which will destroy Earth in late 2063 Pioneer 10 Voyager I Eris (All hail Discordia!) Pluto (Not a planet. Neener neener.) Neptune Uranus Saturn [Two arrows point to two moons, one next to each of the planets above and below.] <-- Life --> Jupiter Asteroids Mars Venus Sun Mercury Spaceship Planet Express: Hey, a heaping bowl of salt! Spaceship Discovery One: Open the fridge door, Hal. Moon Human altitude record (Apollo 13) 2nd place: Snoop Dogg Space elevator - One of these days, promise! Geosynchronous Orbit GPS satellites Lunar lander: In retrospect, they shouldn't have sent a poet. I have no idea how to land. International Space Station Space junk -Official edge of space (100 km)- Meteors -1/10 ATM- High altitude balloons Airliners Shuttle Columbia lost -1/2 ATM- Cory Doctrow Everest Helicopters (6000 m) Cueball: Woo Python! [A vertical scale is drawn along the right side of the picture, starting at 1 km and getting progressivly smaller and smaller.] 1 km -800 m- Burj Dubai (~800 m) 500 400 Eiffel Tower (325 m) 200 Kites Great Pyramid (140 m) Pop fly Redwood (115 m) 100m Oak (20 m) A person in the oak: Hey squirrels! Tallest stilts Brachiosaur (13 m) Giraffe (8 m) [Megan and Cueball holding the kite are labeled:] Folks The observable universe, from top to bottom ~On a log scale~ Sizes are not to scale, but heights above the Earth's surface are accurate on a log scale. (That is, each step up is double the height.)
