If you laid every virus head to toe ...

You would get a very slender string of significant length ...

Welcome to Your Viral World | The Loom | Carl Zimmer for Discover Magazine

...Line up all the viruses on Earth end to end (go ahead, I’ll wait), and they’ll stretch over 10 million light years....

Is this conceivable? I know our planet is a seething ball of virii, but even a single light year is a very great length.

See also:

• The most marvelous world of the virus
• Why would a virus fatten an animal? (2006)
• Dark matter DNA
• Reflections on my personal bacterial companions
• Computers, viruses, intelligent design, natural selection, memes, mitochondria and, of course, the Fermi Paradox