When we pass by something every day, it’s easy to get used to picturing it a certain way. Bit by bit, that mental image becomes more ingrained into our brains and, as that happens, we stop thinking about the little details that may be influencing our perception.
And if our assumptions are mundane enough, we don’t usually run into any reason to challenge them. A young child with a million questions might land on one that makes us realize we don’t really know as much as we think, but that’s a matter of sheer luck and circumstance.
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But today, what we think we know about the size of certain things in our lives will be turned on its head. Because it turns out that a lot of things in this world are bigger than we think they are.
While the Petra Monastery here would seem large and impressive on its own, that doesn’t mean we still can’t underestimate its size.
As we can see here, even the doorway to get in is easily twice the size of one of us, if not triple our size.
Unless you’ve been unlucky enough to encounter a moose in the wild, it’s easy to forget how big they are.
They look dopey enough to have a fairly cuddly reputation in pop culture, but there’s a reason these people are running away from it.
If it wanted to, the moose could probably mess up that van in a major way and it’s unpredictable enough to try. They’re kind of like hippos that way.
Although street lights vary in size, the fact that they don’t seem so high up has a way of masking how big they really are.
From where they’re perched, we might get the impression that we could carry each light on our shoulders. In reality, we can see that this one is almost half the size of this 5′ 10” person.
And while we’re at it, traffic lights are a whole lot bigger than they seem as well.
Although it’s hard to get a sense of scale from just part of this person’s foot, they would likely find it’s about as large as they are if they had laid down on it.
Even the largest snake in the world doesn’t hold a candle to how big they used to be.
While we can grant that this is a child and therefore, not the greatest way of comparing our relative size to the snake, it’s worth noting that a prehistoric snake wouldn’t even have to unhinge its jaw to eat in this case.
Imagine being, at best, a light snack for a snake.
While we might imagine that NRG Stadium would have to be pretty big to house over 70,000 people, it’s staggering to get such a direct sense of how massive it is.
After all, we know how big an 18-wheeler is and that’s not even as big as that star in the middle.
Compared to the sheer size of the field here, it looks like a toy car.
When most of us see wind turbines from a great distance, it’s easy to forget how large they actually are.
As we can see here, even one blade on the energy-generating structure is about 351-feet long. It takes a huge truck to haul one of these and each turbine has three of them.
Once you remember how many turbines are usually in a wind farm, the sheer amount of work that goes into making that operation possible becomes astronomical to think about.
Sea lions may not seem that big at Sea World, but they take on a whole new character when we see them in the wild.
This boat isn’t exactly a yacht, but the fact that just two of these creatures seem to be enough to sink it certainly gives us a new perspective on their size.
We know that turtle sizes can vary a lot, but there’s still a big difference between the kind we’re used to and a sea turtle.
Many of us have come across some large snapping turtles, but even their size is nothing compared to the size of a sea turtle. They can be as big as us, if not bigger!
Even though it’s a bad idea, it almost seems like we could ride this one, right?
Considering how many people can be packed into a plane, it’s hard to imagine how large something must be to “eat” one of them.
As we can see here, however, that’s essentially the job of the Airbus Beluga, which seems to transport airplane parts.
Since it occupies a pretty awkward part of the world map design we’re used to, it’s easy not to realize how large Antarctica is.
Of course, that gets even easier when we take into account how much the most popular Mercator projection of the world distorts the actual size of landmasses.
But as we can see here, the entire United States could comfortably fit down there and we’re talking about the fourth largest country in the world.
I could tell you the size of a harpy eagle in sheer numbers, but this probably illustrates that point a little better.
Yes, it’s large enough that our hands can comfortably fit into its talons. Well, comfortably for the eagle, anyway.
Believe it or not, it’s actually kind of possible to underestimate the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza despite the fact that it’s one of the wonders of the world.
After all, we know that it’s obviously big, but did you really imagine it as “just one of its bricks is larger than us” big until you saw this picture?
By a similar token, there’s a big difference between knowing in the abstract that redwoods are among the world’s largest trees and actually seeing one.
From the looks of it, if we hollowed one out and tried to live in it like a Keebler elf, it would probably feel more spacious than a New York apartment for which someone would expect you to pay $1,500 a month.
Although even the largest SIM cards aren’t so big, it’s still crazy to realize how much smaller they’ve already become.
Doesn’t it look like we could cut the one we use now out of any of the ones that would have been in our phones 10 years ago?
You may not have encountered a dandelion as big as your hand and, technically, you still haven’t.
Instead, we’re looking at a plant that’s commonly known as a yellow goatsbeard and bears a strong resemblance to the common nuisance flower with one pretty clear difference.
Counting how many of these are placed along a railroad would be an incredibly arduous task, which makes it easy to forget how large each one is.
Just one of them barely fits in an adult’s hand, so it’s no surprise that the people who have to lay these down would indeed be working all the live long day.
Since the ancient art in the Cave of Lascaux is too delicate for us to get too close to, we don’t have many opportunities to see how large it is.
If you’ve wondered what was so special about our ancestors painting a bunch of animals, it helps to realize that the scale they were working on was about as ambitious as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It makes sense that the world’s most high tech RC car is this big.
This is a photo of the Curiosity rover, which completely upturned my thought that it was only up to a human’s knees. Why did I think that? Couldn’t tell you, but I like this version more.
Seeing as it houses a whole crew, its own inner workings, and more, all underwater submarines have to be large.
But seeing one next to the crew it held it still pretty shocking. I guess they always had ample space!
Bear cub? Capybara? Mutant groundhog? No, this is a wombat.
I feel like it’s my life mission to show people how big wombats are seeing as I was extremely blown away when I first discovered this info.
When fully excavated, the Easter Island heads were revealed to be way bigger than originally thought.
Thanks to being buried, this guy has a wicked tan line. No worries, buddy. You’ve got loads of time to even that out now.
This is a fruit bat, and to really drive home the size, they’re also called megabats.
Technically “megabat” is a suborder containing multiple species of bats, but they’re all huge, with some weighing up to 3.2 pounds (1.45 kg) and having wingspans up to 5.6 feet (1.7 m).
One polar bear paw can fit two human hands and then some.
Seeing as many of us will never be physically close to a polar bear (at least, I hope not), it can be hard to imagine the sheer difference in size.
Not only is this cactus giant and impressive, but it’s old, too!
This is a saguaro cactus, which is the largest species of cactus and can grow to be 40 feet (12 m) tall. However, they’re very slow growers, pushing seven inches a year and only growing a new arm about once every 70 years!
I see thick chains sold in hardware stores and am impressed, but this is a whole other ballgame!
Chains this big are most often used for the movement of shipping containers, but they have a lot of uses on cargo ships.
This one requires a little restructuring, as on the left is an elephant femur and on the right is a triceratops femur!
We always think of dinos as impossibly large, but it’s interesting to know some beasts today match them in size!
If you’re wondering how large an American aircraft carrier has to be to count as a “supercarrier,” this is your answer.
It’s wild to think about, but the craft that most of us have any hope of owning could probably be destroyed by this behemoth without anyone on board noticing we were there.
When you’re speeding down the highway, you don’t really get to stop and see how big some signs are.
And seeing as they need to have high visibility and easy readability, I can see why they’re this huge!
Based on how cute they are and their diminuitive-sounding name, we expect the kiwi to be a pretty small bird.
As we can see here, however, that couldn’t be farther from the truth and it’s actually several times larger than most birds we see every day.
