Talk:3283: Size and Lifespan

I am surprised black holes have so little mass. Can this be correct? 163.116.173.198 a black hole

Black holes can come in a vast range of masses - we're only seeing the relatively tiny short-lived ones, but they extend well off the chart into much more massive and long-lived ones. 82.13.184.33 12:20, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I assume for Black Holes mass is not in kilograms, but in solar masses. 193.210.0.32 (talk) 13:53, 10 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

No - black holes can, theoretically, come in any mass - from hundreds of thousands of solar masses down to a Planck mass (including blue whale sized (and bowl of petunias sized)) - so the line would extend both well above and well below what's shown on the chart. 82.13.184.33 14:05, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Actually, 'well above' is debatable - as far as I can figure, Randall's chart already goes a couple of orders of magnitude beyond the current age of the universe, so how much further there is to go is uncertain. 82.13.184.33 14:15, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Since the vertical coordinate is lifetime, it does go "well above" and "well below" the graph as well, as a black hole's lifetime is proportional to M³ (e. g., a 2 kg BH has 8× longer lifetime than a 1 kg BH (41.86 qs and 5.2325 qs, respectively), a BH with mass equal to the Planck mass (c. 21.76 μg) has lifetime equal to the Planck time (c. 5.39124e-44 s)). So expanding the graph, it goes 43.269 orders of magnitude below 1 s and many magnitudes above 10²⁰ s. 2001:4C4D:12C8:C800:5D8E:47D2:C546:908 18:55, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Even a 1 solar mass black hole would have a lifespan in excess of 10⁶⁷ years, which would place it well outside the bounds of this graph, and heavier ones would have even longer lifespans. Zmatt (talk) 13:41, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

I definitely want to know why white blood cells have two "clumps" of area instead of a contiguous area. AdmiralMemo (talk) 12:30, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

See the table here - certain lymphocytes have a lifetime of years, whereas for other white blood cells it's only hours or days. 82.13.184.33 12:39, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The table is wildly off and doesn't match the graph. Wolves weight 1 kilogram? Blue Whales weigh 100 kg? 2803:7260:110:270:ad6d:487c:fa3:ce0 (talk) 12:35, 10 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Table re-measured to the nearest quarter-increment. SomeDee (talk) 12:57, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Logarithmic scale. 10^10=10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10=10000000000 Inevitablepotato36 (talk) 00:01, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

yeah it does seem a litlle off actually- Inevitablepotato36 (talk) 00:02, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Does anyone know what the title text is talking about? I feel like it's referencing some sort of sport thing, but I'm not sure MiquelFire (talk) 14:24, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The White Stripes were a two-person band active between 1997 and 2011 - see Wikipedia link in the table. 82.13.184.33 14:40, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Does Greenland's mass include the ice cap? Should mention this. DKMell (talk) 16:07, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The age of Greenland on the chart appears to be roughly the age of the Earth. In one sense I suppose that makes sense, in that the material that now makes up Greenland came together at around that point, but I would have expected it to have been set at the point when it separated off from the continent due to ice sheet collapse. 82.13.184.33 16:29, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Given that everything else is a lifespan rather than an age, I think it may be referring to time remaining until the Sun becomes a red giant and consumes the Earth (Greenland included). Zmatt (talk) 13:25, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

Is there a joke I'm missing in the fact that everything is a color?

Not sure you're missing anything - that kind of is (a large part of) the joke - the only thing that ties them together is a colour in the name, which makes them a silly set of things to graph together. 82.13.184.33 08:26, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand why there are no velociraptors in this chart. Their fans are _very_ colorful. 2601:647:4001:656B:5DEB:C9F7:C93D:4E77 18:23, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Black holes in the middle? Given that black holes cover the full range of mass, and the population is weighted (heh) towards the top, why did Randall put them in the middle of the graph? 37.19.220.64 19:00, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Where else? It would be equally incorrect to have them either at the low end (many are enormously massive) or the high end (theoretically, there were Planck mass black holes at the Big Bang). Nitpicking (talk) 22:07, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The graph includes only very small, theoretical block holes (up to <10¹³ kg, or 5x10^-18 solar masses) because larger ones take a very long time to evaporate. If it showed the largest supermassive black holes, which would indeed extend over to the right edge of the graph, it would have to be six times as tall - and if that were scaled to still fit on your screen, you couldn't see the detail of any of the things you see here. DKMell (talk) 23:27, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

If it were to include all black holes, including the tiniest theoretical micro black holes, it would have to be even taller (and wider), as the scale would have to be extended well off the bottom as well. 82.13.184.33 08:34, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Me again. Understood. However, given that the range of black holes starts smaller than the smaller objects and finishes larger than the largest objects, I would recommend putting it on the left or the right of the graph - and include an inset zoomed out to a relevant scale. There's no justification for putting it between blue whales and the red sea. 158.173.67.152 16:36, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

That would just be inaccurate. It's a scatterplot. A black hole with a lifespan comparable to a blue whale has a mass somewhere between a blue whale and the red sea. They're exactly where they should be. 2600:1010:B217:A158:540C:84F2:8D25:8BC5 17:53, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, you're right. I think I just have a headache seeing that the black hole range goes off both ends vertically; I keep fixating on smaller and smaller ones, and on larger and larger ones and where *they* would fit. I just think the graph needs an insert for the full range of black holes. 158.173.21.22 18:08, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Trivia: the White Stripes released an album called White Blood Cells. Nitpicking (talk) 22:12, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

True - although those White Blood Cells would ruin the spurious graph, being CD-sized or vinyl-sized (or bits on a computer-sized) and having a lifespan of 25 years and counting already. (Randall has snuck in another 'making you feel old' reference here, probably without even realising it!) 82.13.184.33 08:38, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Non-Living data points: The idea of treating large systems using the same law of scale is also discussed by Geoffrey West in his book "Scale". https://www.organism.earth/library/document/scale -- Jh6p (talk) 22:38, 10 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

He has left out oranges and "purple" items (purple martin, purple mountain majesties, etc). Also, I cannot find any things that are known as "magenta X" or "cyan X", perhaps there isn't any well known enough. SDSpivey (talk) 02:35, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Cyanobacteria seems like an obvious choice for that. I don't know anything magenta-named that would fit. 02:35, 11 August 2026 (UTC) 125.236.215.22 03:32, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

There's Magenta from Rocky Horror. 82.13.184.33 08:29, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Why does the black hole line get thicker higher up? Is it due to uncertainty in how fast it grows at this scale, or is the constant unknown? (I assume not uncertainty in rate of Hawking radiation, as I thought that uncertainty is on the small end and is about the contribution of non-photon emissions?) 2003:EB:5F1C:AF00:19B6:547E:51CC:9C29 07:34, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Why do black holes get bigger uncertainty at the top than at the bottom? 159.224.64.162 08:30, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I guess because the larger they get, the larger the sphere of surrounding matter that will get pulled into them, so the lifespan will depend somewhat on how much matter is within that sphere. 82.13.184.33 09:05, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Seems like BH becomes the size of a proton at ~10^11-10^12, and the size of an atom at ~10^17 159.224.64.162 13:14, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I think this is a reference to star colors and lifespans. Thoughts? Capycapybara (talk) 10:37, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Next time add proton lifetime :D 46.182.184.167 (talk) 13:45, 11 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Given the discussed range in Black hole sizes and lifespans wouldn't they simply fill the chart? 158.95.0.132 (talk) 21:38, 11 August 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

No, not 'the whole chart', because size and time(-left) is a fairly connected ratio. What we're seeing is the lifetimes that range from 10^0 seconds (1 second) to 10^20 seconds (approximately pi long-billion, or short-trillian, years) by the top of the axis (maybe a hundred times longer than that, if you count until the comic's frame-top). These limits relate to black-hole masses of maybe 315ish tonnes to an order of around 1/10¹²-ish the mass of the Earth (less than the mass of the Red Sea or Greenland, you'll note from the graph). This is an absurdly small black hole to consider, for most practical purposes.

The top black holes are several million solar masses (blue giant stars are maybe 200 solar masses), but just don't appear on the graph at all unless you extend the time axis up far enough to accommodate that range. And the mass one far enough right. But it would still be just a (potentially widening) line on the mostly white graph with barely a smudge of anything other than this line, down in on this bit that we're 'zoomed-in on' for the actual comic.

...to put it another way, you don't have a million solar-mass black hole with a second of lifetime, nor a microscopic one with a lifetime of much more than a blink of an eye. Though you (may) have ones that fit across both ranges, they're values that are tied (more loosely, at the top end, for various possible reasons) directly to each other, only drawing out a line of sorts, not enclosing an entire area-block. 92.23.0.28 22:22, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Did Randall mix up mass and time? Why are Greenland more massive than every black hole so far and well into the next million universe life-spans? 83.209.137.72 (talk) 06:35, 13 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

What you're seeing isn't every black hole so far - it's possible black holes. 82.13.184.33 08:41, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

More precisely, it's the (theoretically-)possible black holes that fit within the comic frame. Follow that black hole plot up far enough and it will eventually slide over into star-sized mass territory (but at very much more time than can be plotted there).

Also, Greenland is only at about "the age of the universe so far", by my reckoning (without looking at the Explanation table, so may include an original mistake upon my part), depending on exactly where in the blob you measure to. But that might include how long more it is supposed to 'live' on top of how long it has existed on Earth so far.

Black holes and (redder) stars do go significantly into older-than-the-universe territory. Depending upon what future cosmology will turn out to be, that may well be what we could effectively get. 92.23.0.28 19:15, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

The x-axis is labelled "size", with units "kg". Normally "size" is distance (meters) or volume (cubic meters). Is this the first strip referring to size in kilograms, normally a unit of mass (and commonly misconceived as a unit of weight)? 158.173.67.228 16:51, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

I agree that this is more a layperson usage of 'size' than it is any scientific one (incidentally, as the Title Text talks of mass, it's likely a true kg-as-mass usage in the units). And, given no other information, I'd expect "size" to be given as a singly-dimensioned unit (metres, or equivalent; including incident angle), either of height or largest extent or diameter or of the greatest/easiest-measured circumference (whichever one, obviously that being used consistently between compared objects), and only area (cross-section, or solid-angle) or volume if defined as m² (or steradians) or m³, or dimensionally compatible units.

But I think it's fairly obvious that "size" is "amount of stuff" in the not unusual kilogrammes-of-mass sense. Which is perhaps more strictly definable than length-based units, given the drastically different densities to be expected in (and within) the various example items, and the significantly non-spherical (if not not-entirely-convex) shapes of some of them. 92.23.0.28 17:30, 23 August 2026 (UTC)