Have you ever noticed that you never see Clark Table and Supertable in the same room at the same time?

Plot twist: there is no direct evidence that Twain ever said such a quote. Which is very fitting for this meme, its’ very point itself.

Thank you! You got what I was trying to ask, but I didn’t know exactly how to put it into words.

Put another way, now that you have landed on the number I was missing:
Each elastic yardstick of 41 million light years, has stretched to 45.5 billion light years, and it took 13.7 billion years to do it. Trying to visualize this type of abstract math borders on the surreal.
EDIT: maybe something like this famous dolly zoom?

But wait, there’s more…!
I’ve heard it said often, in print and video, that inflation took the universe from subatomic size to the size of an orange, or to the size of the solar system, or even several light years, in an instant. That’s quite an error range in the narratives.

But when the CMB flashed, what we call the visible universe was barely 380,000 years old, but already 41 million light years across. And the geometry of it seems flat, so if it is actually curved, it must be have been gigantically larger than that already.

Like I said, trying to visualize this borders on the surreal for a fragile primate mind barely out of the grassy steppes, in a much more placid place and time of the life of the cosmos.

“I am at the center of god’s universe!”
From your narcissistic, myopic perspective with no depth, sure, that’s what you see. But from where we’re standing, you’re just another idiot, and you’re dead.

Curious, in contrast I remember when they aired A Fish Called Wanda (that was a long time ago), they censored John Cleese’s response to one of Otto’s inarticulate verbal insult streams:
“How very interesting… you’re a true vulgarian, aren’t you?”

…so as to not offend… people from Bulgaria, I guess? They might confuse the V with a B, then write strongly worded letters to the head of network programming?

For fun times…
make it Suntory time.

Armchair internet weekend warriors see everything in black and white with no in-between grays and no context. Tune in for more details at eleven.