Our known universe is ~93 Billion light years across. That’s… 5.4671259 × 1023
or 546,712,590,000,000,000,000,000 miles across!
There are maybe 100,000,000,000 galaxies, each with tens-of-millions of stars if not billions. Many of those stars are solar systems containing planets. Ours has about 8. One of those is known to harbor life, possibly more.
Leaving out questions of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, it all sure make things here on Earth seem mighty insignificant.
"Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that evolving,
Revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second,
So it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
It's 100,000 light years side to side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick,
But out by us it's just 3,000 light years wide.
We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point,
We go around every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
In this amazing and expanding universe..."
“kind of makes you feel kind of… insignificant.”
“So… can we have your liver than?”
“Alright… you talked me into it.”
“ERIC!”
My question is… how do you know you aren’t seeing more than one of the same galaxies in there? What if space wraps around like a big loop, as some predict? There could be only a million galaxies that apear a million times…
Still an awesome sight to see. Too bad nobody living today will even get to know anything about them
If as a species we survive adolescence I can’t begin to imagine what we will know in another 5000 years.
Yeah, homo-sapien has been around for 250000+ years, but our scientific evolution has really only been going on since the bronze age less than 3000 years ago. In that time we’ve gone from rudimentary metal work to space probes reaching the edge of our solar system.
I know when I seriously think about it I get a little depressed knowing I will miss out on so many secrets the future will uncover.
