Aristotle thought we were the center of the universe, every star, every planet was spinning around us.
Sometimes, as humans, we tend to overestimate our own importance, forever caught up in how vast even our own planet seems.
The diameter of the sun is more than 100 times that of Earth.
Even in our own solar system, Earth makes up only 0.0003% of the total mass. The total weight is equivalent to about 333,345.997 Earth masses.
Somewhere between 99.8 and 99.9 percent of the mass in our solar system is our sun.
This is our sun compared to VY Canis Majoris, the second largest star, UY Scuti being the largest known star. The sun is around one-2,000th smaller: an 860,000-mile diameter compared to 1.8 billion miles.
If a plane was traveling at around 550 mph, it would take 1,100 years to fully circle the star.
Astronomers estimate that in the Milky Way alone, there are between 100 and 300 billion stars.
Our solar system is moving at 514,000 mph. We do not feel a thing. At this speed, we have made 15 laps around the Milky Way since life on Earth started.
This is just one galaxy, our galaxy.
This is the Local Group, a collection of our neighboring galaxies; the number is estimated to be around 47.
Two galaxies were detected recently, with the help of infrared radiation. In our own area, our own group, there could be entire galaxies that go unnoticed by us, invisible.
Some of the larger clusters can contain hundreds of galaxies.
The Virgo Supercluster is one of these.
Spanning 110 million light years, it holds about a hundred galaxy clusters, like our own local group.
Then there’s the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, comprised of about 60 superclusters of galaxies.
About 1.37 billion light years across, it holds around a tenth of the observable universe.
If all the grains of sand, from every beach, every desert, everywhere on Earth were equivalent to the universe, Earth would not even be 1 single grain of sand.
93 billion light years across, and housing an estimated 10-billion superclusters, this is the observable universe.
We are not even ants in the scheme of things.
We are small, microscopic, infinitesimal.
Analogies fail here; it is difficult to even attempt to wrap our heads around how tiny our planet is.
We are impossibly small, impossibly trivial.
Isn’t it scary?
