A SENSE OF SCALE

So, whilst I was lurking near to the coast the other week,  I happened to point my camera out to sea and took this picture of what I thought was a pretty “big” ship. Then we strolled around the town a little and watched as the so-called “big” ship passed an even bigger ship which suddenly made it look rather tiny in comparison and meanwhile, my own personal sense of scale got well and truly bamboozled.

I hadn’t been this confused about the relative proportions of things since I’d first seen “Return of the Jedi” back in 1983…

Pauses to remember driving home from a late night showing of that in my midnight blue Cortina MkIII having watched the “Falcon” flying through the insides of the all-new “Death Star” just ten minutes earlier.

There may very well have been speeding going on…

(I was young, I was foolish…)

There may very well have been an idiot driver making zappy laser blast noises, too…

(I was young, I was very foolish and the girls all avoided me like the plague…)

Still… All water under the bridge now, eh…? Or, at least, flowing into the English Channel...

Anyway there’s a bit in “Return of the Jedi” where some of those MASSIVE spaceships that opened “Star Wars” (when it was still called “Star Wars”) get well and truly dwarfed by the REALLY MASSIVE super-duper spaceship that was being used to ferry Darth Vader and his collection of various shades of cloak around the galaxy.

(I’m sure his vast expenditure – presumably on his expense account - on buying all of those pastel outfits which he then never wore was a source of much controversy at the time, but it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, so we ought to let it lie…)

Eventually, due to the requirements of the plot (and therefore perhaps worthy of a SPOILER ALERT even though it was a very long time ago, etc…), the REALLY MASSIVE super-duper spaceship crashes into the all-new and REALLY REALLY MASSIVE “Death Star” ruining everyone’s day and quite a few “No-claims bonuses” at the same time I should imagine.

At that stage, the REALLY MASSIVE super-duper spaceship suddenly looks very tiny indeed and our minds had been melted by the sheer awesomeness of a sense of scale that we hadn’t really understood since that strange film that they used to show us at school which zoomed out from the atoms in a mosquito on a bloke’s arm to encompass the entire universe as we knew it back then.

Of course the REALLY REALLY MASSIVE all-new “Death Star” is then totally dwarfed by the bloody great big planet around which it is orbiting - you know, the one populated by all of those cute little teddy bear things - and we finally get some kind of sense of perspective of the limits of our own engineering abilities and the size of things that we can build when you make the comparison on a universal scale.

We might be able to build things that are visible from space, but not all that many, and the forces of nature and gravity can do it all far better and more impressively that we humans ever will, even if they can get a little bit slack about meeting delivery dates...

Anyway, big ship, bigger ship, small rowing boat. You get the picture...