# 5: Just How Big or Small Is It

For years so it seems,the age-old question "Does size matter" actually comes into play this time around. And no, this has nothing to do with sex. Let us proceed.

Encompassing an estimated 1,218.37 acres (1,904 square miles), the Grand Canyon is capable of holding 1 – 2 quadrillion gallons of water. If you poured all the river water on Earth into the Grand Canyon, it would still only be about half full.

The smallest thing that we can see with a 'light' microscope is about 500 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth (that's 1,000,000,000th) of a meter. So the smallest thing that you can see with a light microscope is about 200 times smaller than the width of a hair. Bacteria are about 1000 nanometers in size.

The Michigan Micro Mote is currently the world’s smallest computer at just 2mm x 4mm and requires an average of just 500 pico watts in operation and just 35 pico watts in standby or about a millionth of the power of a mobile phone on standby.

For a computer to be classed truly as a computer it must have an input, a processor to handle the data from the input and then output the results somehow. The Michigan Micro Mote has a processor, a radio for wifi communications, a solar cell and battery for power, a photocell for communications and can have a variety of sensors like pressure, temperature, imaging etc making the Micro Mote a fully self-contained computer that can run on just the normal lighting in a room.

With the largest telescope ever, The Arecibo Observatory should look familiar even if you’re not an internationally renowned scientist. It’s appeared in a handful of fairly popular movies, most famously in Golden-Eye and Contact. In the real world, it’s located in Puerto Rico and is the largest radio telescope on Earth. In fact, it’s so big it was easier to turn an existing limestone sinkhole into a telescope than to build one completely from scratch. The telescope’s main function is to track planets and asteroids passing Earth, with the latter focusing on those that could potentially damage our planet, though it’s also been used as a broadcasting station. In 1974, scientists used the facility to translate and send pictures to M13, a cluster of stars 21,000 light years away.

Sequoia trees are the biggest living things on this planet (by volume). They can grow up to 275 feet tall and 26 feet in diameter.

Manmade, Three Gorges Dam, this dam spans the Yangtze River in China and was built at the cost of $37 billion (U.S.). Considered the biggest hydroelectric dam ever built, it displaced 1.3 million people. It even has the capacity to slow the very rotation of the earth by strategically shifting significant masses of water.