Thoughts from Over Here

What's it worth? All this, what we would call life. Just so you know, I have no idea where I am going with this. Just letting out a random thought to see where it goes.

Here I sit; in a chair at a desk. This desk is inside a building, which is inside a city. This city, it is within a province and this province is part of a country. This great country is but a part of a continent which forms a world we call Earth. Earth, the seemingly large mother of all known life, is all but a tiny speck against the backdrop of this solar system.

The earth is a looming 13,000 km wide, a lot it seems. The Sun is 1.4 million kilometers wide and roughly 100 times the size of our little Earth. The distance from the Sun to the Earth is 150 million kilometers or over 100 times the width of the Sun. This only accounts for 1/40th of the distance from the Sun to the outermost planet of Pluto which is almost 6 trillion kilometers.

To put this all into scale; if the earth were 1.5 millimeters wide, or roughly the size of a grain of sand, the sun would be 16.5 cm wide, the size of a mini-basketball, and they would be 18 meters(60 feet) apart. Therefore Pluto, being about the size of a speck of dust, would be 700 meters(2300 feet) from the Sun.

But let's not stop here, let's look for the next closest star. Using the same scale as before, the next closest star would be slightly greater than the distance from Los Angeles to the state of Maine(4.3 lightyears or 40 trillion kilometers).

Our seemingly huge solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy which contains 200 billion stars like our Sun and is 100,000 lightyears across. In the same scale as before, where the earth was 1.5 millimeters across, the width of the Milky Way is 112 million kilometers or 75% of the real distance from the earth to the sun.

Are we getting big yet? Let's reduce the scale even further. Our entire galaxy, the one that was just 112 million km wide compared the 1.5 mm Earth, is now the size of a softball. The nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy, which would be about the size of a volleyball, and 4.8 meters(16 feet) away.

The Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies belong to what is called the Local Group of 30 galaxies, which is a galaxy cluster. The next closest galaxy cluster in the Virgo cluster which in our current scale is 50 meters(160 feet) distant. The Local Group and Virgo cluster belong to what is called the Local SuperCluster which is 190 meters(625 feet) across and the entire observable universe is about 49.5 kilometers in diameter(260 times the diameter of the Local SuperCluster).

There are estimated to be 50 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and as much as 200 billion galaxies in the entire universe. What exists beyond this, nobody truly knows.

Now, do you think any of your problems really matter?