Really this title is a hillarious bad misnomer, DNA, the blueprint for every living thing on the earth cannot be said to be simple. Small would seem to be a good term for it, after all every cell in your body contains all the DNA necessary to recreate your body in its entirety (generally speaking, and assuming much science we can’t do yet). That’s pretty small isn’t it? Scientists have to use amazingly awesome microscopes to look at strands of DNA in its jumbled ball in your cell.

WARNING: From here on out, there’s going to be a lot of rounding, and as a result, some of my numbers and the numbers I found while searching (while they too varied greatly) aren’t going to agree. Generally speaking I’m going to try to find the general consensus on the base values and round it to numbers that I feel like dealing with (not a mountain of decimal points basically, what can I say, I’m lazy). Let’s rejoin our already in progress post…

But hold on, is small really the right word either? Because though there seems to be some difference in the exact length, every estimate I’ve found says that if you take the DNA from a single cell and stretch it out straight, you’ll stretch between 2.3-3 meters (7.5-9.8 feet). Suddenly it doesn’t seem so small, but then let’s think about this, there are a lot of cells in the average adult person. From what I can find the estimates range between 10-100 trillion (10^13 -10^14). In my best Keanu Reeves… Whoa. So lets combine those numbers, but I’m going to split the difference on both distances. So… 2.65 meters per cell times 50 trillion cells… 1.325 x 10^11 kilometers or, 885.7 astronomical units. If you’ve read the previous post, you might remember that pluto’s orbit on average is just shy of 40.1 au away from the sun (1 au being the distance from the earth to the sun). So that would suggest that our DNA, though far narrower than the human hair could be long enough for 11 round trips from the sun to pluto. Wow, just wow. Yeah there’s a lot of estimation in there, but even on the low end by the way, that’s still 2 round trips (high end is 25). I don’t think I can add anything to that number, that’s just freaking amazingly long. In fact I’m just going to stop here, my head hurts, these numbers (even treated as slices of our own solar system) are just too big for me.

Reposted from something I wrote on facebook in reaction to this (A tiny sliver of a martian meteorite available for purchase on thinkgeek). With a couple corrections to lengths I got wrong

Ok it’s a tiny tiny fragment, but there’s this part of me that still really wants this. Because holy crap it’s a tiny piece of another planet! Yeah sure it’s neatly packaged so it’s not like I can hold it in my hands but there’s something pretty cool about being able to pick up a piece of our nearest planetary neighbor (also there’s chunks of the moon but still man, *Mars*). Nearest still means that at the very closest it’s nearly 34 million miles away (and even that’s a once in 50,000 year thing). I can’t even find a good thing to compare that distance too that isn’t too large to really follow, radio transmissions (speed of light) would take 3 minutes to cover that distance? Still too abstract to grasp, and it’s just over 1/3 the distance from earth to the sun. Now compare to the distance between the sun to the earth: 1 au, then the sun to pluto: 40.1 au (on average or 3.7 billion miles). Forget the galaxy or the universe, our own solar system is incomprehensibly large. Man I am glad I added the link to this before I got started this one got away from me and I’m not sure I could remember what got me started. The ibuprofen may have taken enough of an edge off the pain to go to bed, so I’d better skedaddle.