98 Big Things

John Spacey, updated on October 22, 2024

Big things are large scale structures and entities that exist at enormous scale. This ranges from the largest things in the known universe down to things that are comparatively large such as the largest living thing, infrastructure or machine.

All (98)

Space (19)

Earth (28)

Human-made (41)

Natural (10)

African Elephants	Airbus A380
Aircraft	Aircraft Carriers
Amazon Rainforest	Amazon River
Andromeda Galaxy	Angkor Wat
Antarctic Ice Sheet	Arctic Desert
Artificial Islands	Asian Continent
Bagger 288 (largest Land Vehicle)	Blue Whales
Boreal Forest	Bridges
Bulldozers	Burj Khalifa (building)
Camp Nou	Canals
Coast Redwood Trees	Congo Rainforest
Container Ships	Continents
Cosmic Voids	Cruise Ships
Dark Matter Structures	Data Centers
Dump Trucks	Excavators
Factories	Galaxy Clusters
Galaxy Filaments	Giant Kelp
Giant Sequoia Trees	Giraffes
Grand Canyon	Great Barrier Reef
Great Basin Bristlecone Pine	Great Lakes
Great Mosque of Mecca	Great Pyramid of Giza
Himalayas	Honey Fungus
Islands	K2
Kilimanjaro	Lake Superior
Large Hadron Collider	Louvre Museum
Melbourne Cricket Ground	Milky Way
Mississippi River	Moons
Mount Everest	Mount Fuji
Mountain Ranges	Nebulae
New Caledonia Barrier Reef	Nile River
Oceans	Oil Tankers
Pacific Ocean	Panama Canal
Planets	Quasars
Red Giants	Reservoirs
Rocky Mountains	Sahara Desert
Saturn V Rocket	Seawise Giant (largest Ship Ever Built)
Shanghai Tower	Shapley Supercluster
Solar Systems	St. Peter's Basilica
Stars	Supergiant Galaxy IC 1101
Supermassive Black Holes	Supernovae
The Alps	The Andes
The California Aqueduct	The Forbidden City
The Great Attractor	The Great Wall of China
The Palace of Versailles	The Sun
The Trans-Siberian Railway	Three Gorges Dam
Tractors	Trains
US Interstate Highway System	Viaducts
Warehouses	Wembley Stadium
Whales	Yangtze River

Space Things

Space is so large that humans can't really conceptualize it. We can understand how large an ocean is by sailing across it but we have neither the speed nor time required to navigate even a tiny spec of the universe itself. The following chart illustrates the relative scale of our planet compared to the universe.

Observable Universe	2,000,000,000,000 Galaxies
Galaxies	The IC 1101 galaxy alone has around 100,000,000,000,000 stars.
Stars	The Sun is 1.3 million times bigger than the Earth by volume.
Earth	If the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, at that scale the Observable Universe would still be about 8,688,136,000,000,000,000 miles in diameter. This is far larger than any familiar reference point. For example, the Sun is only 864,000 miles in diameter.

Earth Things

The largest geological features of the Earth are continents and oceans. The following are a few comparisons.

Pacific Ocean	Area of 63 million square miles (165 million square kilometers). Its maximum depth is about 6.8 miles or close to 11 kilometers.
Asian Continent	Area of about 17.2 million square miles (44.6 million square kilometers).
Sahara Desert	Area of about 3.6 million square miles (9.2 million square kilometers).
Amazon Rainforest	Area of 2.1 million square miles (5.5 million square kilometers).
The Andes	Total mountain range is about 4,300 miles (7,000 kilometers) long.
Mauna Kea	Height of 6.36 miles if you measure from the base of the ocean.
Mount Everest	Height of 5.52 miles measured from sea level.

Human-made Things

Human-made things are currently far smaller than natural things such as mountains. These are some prominent examples of human-made things that are arguably the largest things in their categories.

Largest by Weight	The Great Wall of China is possibly the heaviest thing ever built by humans with estimates of around 58 million tons.
Longest	The great wall of China is often presumed to be the longest human-made thing at 13,171 miles (21,196 kilometers). However, there are technically longer things. For example, the US Interstate Highway System spans approximately 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers).
Largest Machine	The largest machine or mechanical device is arguably the Large Hadron Collider which includes a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets.
Largest Ship	The largest vehicle ever made is probably the Seawise Giant, an oil tanker that was 564,763 tons. By comparison, the Titanic was 46,328 tons.

The follow photo is the bottom of an Airbus 380, the largest production passenger jet. It weights about 550 tonnes.

Natural Things

The largest known organic thing or life form is a living Honey Fungi that covers more than 3.4 square miles in Oregon's Malheur National Forest. It's estimated to be at least 2,500 years old and may weigh about 35,000 tons. That's smaller than the Titanic but not by much.

Honey Fungi	35,000 tons
Trees	A Giant Sequoia named General Sherman is 275 feet tall and 36.5 feet in diameter at the base. This is the largest known living tree. A reasonable estimate for its weight is 1,300 tons.
Blue Whale	Possibly as much as 200 tons
Elephant	Maximum of about 7 tons

The following is the base of the largest known tree, General Sherman. Although the Honey Fungi in Oregon's Malheur National Forest is larger, it's mostly underground and not viewable in a way that captures its size.