As we all already know, the Universe is huge. Immense. Gargantuan. Colossal. Incomprehensibly so. Yet some try to put the sheer massiveness of it in words or graphs or interactive websites. This is where I got my idea from, so please search up “Scale of the Universe” on Google, after you’re done reading this of course. (or just use the link below)
Putting everything into perspective
To get you all warmed up here’s some statistics until we move onto the heavy stuff (not literally, but some objects on this list are truly and unfathomably massive):
—170cm, the average human height
—3 meters, the average height of an elephant
—4 meters, the size of the Japanese spider crab (yikes)
—6 meters, the height of Tyrannosaurus Rex
—25 meters, the size of a female Blue Whale (roughly 1/3 of an American football field) —8250 square meters, the size of the International Space Station
Speaking of space,
—2376km, the diameter of Pluto (the surface of Pluto is smaller than that of Russia) —12742km, the diameter of Earth, the only home we’ve ever known —50000km, the diameter of Uranus (63 piles of earth could fit inside Uranus)
—1.4 million km, the diameter of the Sun (1.3 million Earths could fit inside the Sun) —if all humans were to be stacked one on top of the other, their combined height would be almost 10 times greater than the diameter of the sun
—4.3 light-years, the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri
—105700 light-years, the diameter of the Milky Way
—93 billion light-years (9 followed by 26 0’s meters, the diameter of the observable Universe (yes, there’s more to it than just what we can see)
The (emotionally) heavy stuff
Carl Sagan, a renowned astrophysicist once said: “Look again at that dot (referring to our planet). That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives (…) on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
The harsh truth is, we’re small. On the macroscopic scale, human lives are blinks of an eye, compared to the age of the Universe. Billions have died before us and billions will die from now on. And we may be alone.
We, homo sapiens sapiens, are a bunch of ants that somehow possess a conscience and imagination. By chance (or by God, some might say), we’ve been allowed to dream about distant worlds far beyond our understanding. Through the perseverance of our predecessors, our race has been on the Moon, and objects made by people in the past have escaped the Solar System.
We, however small we may appear, have an electromagnetic footprint. Paradoxically, we shouldn’t be proud of it, because it comes in the form of radio waves broadcasted during World War 2, carrying the voice of Hitler through the vastness of Space.
Even though all may appear meaningless, because of how expendable a human life is in the context of the Universe, the meaning of our lives is given by none other than ourselves. But sometimes, we conclude that even that meaning is meaningless. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I don’t even want to. This is the beauty of the
The universe for me. Of life too. That’s what the meaning is for me.
by Dragos Manila
SOURCES:
htwins.net/scale2/
planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot
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