How big is our Solar System???
For scale: Our solar system can be broken down like this:
On a diagram of our solar system to scale, the Earth would be resented by the diameter of a pea. Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant still and would be the size of a bacterium. Our solar system doesn’t end there though. The Ort cloud is at the systems boundary and Pluto is barley one fifty thousandths of the way there.
How many stars:
Estimates range from 100 billion to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. And the Milky Way it’s self is only one of about 140 billion other galaxies.
The average distance between stars is 20 million million miles.
The visible and meta-universe
The visible universe (what we can see) is a million million million million miles across. “1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000”
The meta-universe is a bit larger yet. The number of light years it would take to travel from edge to edge of this larger, unseen universe would be formulated with [*well over] a million zero’s (each representing the distance traveled at 186,000 miles a second).
What could be gathered by these facts:. You really aren’t at all as important as you think you are in the grand scale of things!!
Data gathered from Bill Bryson’s *A Short History of Nearly Everything.
What blows my mind, is that, if human life were ever wiped out completely, and thousands of years after that, intelligent life lands on mars and find those rover bots. What will they think? No life around, just some rovers. That trips me out…, only because I think i’m high though.
The OP is, of course, quite correct which means naturally that he is totally wrong. That is, he has put our place in the universe in perspective, which is a dangerous thing because if we really understood how insignificant we are we would probably all go insane. As Douglas Adams once noted, the last thing anyone needs is a perfect sense of perspective. Therefore, I suggest we all ignore this and go back to our comfortable state of denial.
I’m sorry but you are wrong. I am the center of my perceptual universe. Therefore, to me, there is nothing more significant than me. All things are measured by the impact they have on me and therefore anything I have never percieved has zero relevance. (the ort cloud indeed)
You have erred in thinking that the “grand scale of things” in measured in light years. It is not. It is measured in how big of a foot print a thing has in the perceptions of the observer. Anything else is just trivia.
I live in a relative universe not an absolute one.
Makes you think. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a top down view of all that? Talk about putting things in persepctive, how small would the “You Are Here” arrow be?
The subject (unknowingly) took up all of the allowed 36 characters for a title from my paste when I obviously needed 39. (I.E. “k!!”)
So settle down yall!!
I am comforted by the simple fact that I am infinitely more interesting than the universe. When’s the last time a solar system said something that made you snort pop out of your nose?
-Horseflesh, who’s worth his weight in chocolate and just as tasty
I have a shirt like that, except it’s just the Milky Way galaxy. Still, the arrow just points to some uninteresting fuzzy part in one of the arms. You can’t even see the sun, just the hazy blob of stars it’s a part of.
