Our Insignificance is Mind Boggling

A little while back I wrote about a great video that had recently been published, providing insight and perspective into how fantastically large the universe is.  If you have not seen it, I strongly recommend it, even for those who are astronomy buffs and think they know everything currently known about the universe. The reality of just how insignificant the human race is in the grand scheme of things makes me smile every time I watch it.   I know, it sounds weird, but the idea that we have barely scratched the surface of what there is to explore in the universe makes me very happy.  It would be quite depressing if Earth were it, or even the solar system.  There is a billion lifetime's worth of knowledge out there, just waiting for us to explore.  The only upsetting part for me is that I will likely not be around for just about every one of those lifetimes, barring some unforeseen technology to transfer my consciousness into a machine or something (fingers crossed).

Our Insignificance Expressed in Numbers

As a child, I always loved to stare up into the night sky.  Just seeing all the stars and knowing how far away they are from us, with nothing but empty space in between, blew my mind.  The world seems so small today, with the internet connecting the entire globe in an instant, and air travel physically connecting everyone in just a few hours.  Yet, look up in the sky, and see the uncountable number of stars there are are, each one an entire solar system, each one more than likely teeming with planets.  Even if you live in a place where sky viewing conditions aren't optimal, there are just so many stars you can't get your head around it.  And that is just one small section of one galaxy.  There are literally hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, each with probably half a dozen planets apiece at least.  And to top it all off, the vast majority of the universe is still empty space.  There is still so much nothing in between stars that it would take a lifetime or longer, travelling at the speed of light, to get to just about any of our local galactic neighbors.

If you imagined the entire world, with all its countries, people, oceans, mountains, and valleys as the observable universe, a trip from Earth to our nearest solar system would be like travelling from your living room couch to... the other end of your living room couch.  And that trip currently is way beyond our technological prowess.  There is such an absurd amount that we have not been able to explore yet, what we have explored is a drop in a bucket.  No, it isn't even that much.

Our Insignificance Expressed in Video Games

Spore provides
an entertaining
perspective to
the size of the
universe.

For those computer gamers out there, even the casual ones, if you want another way to gain perspective on the size of the universe, I highly recommend playing the game Spore.  It came out a number of years ago, and while the game has its flaws, it gives a great perspective to the massiveness of the galaxy.  The game starts you as a single-celled organism, and as you progress, you move on to a land creature, then an intelligent civilization, then finally to a space-faring race.  The concept is really awesome, and once you get to the final stage, you gain the ability to fly to different solar systems, colonizing habitable planets as you go.  While the model of the galaxy in Spore is a bit simplified (around 100,000 stars versus the 300 billion estimated in the Milky Way), there is really no end in sight as each star contains a number of planets, each with its own unique ecology, including animal and plant life, and a few have intelligent races or space-faring races of their own.  It is really incredible how much there is to explore in the game, and that is in a single galaxy less than 1/10,000th of a percent the size of the Milky Way (0.000033%).

Our Insignificance Expressed Graphically

So now do you feel insignificant enough?  So far I have just compared our solar system to the rest of the galaxy and universe.  Relative to the sheer number of star systems in the galaxy, our single star system is nearly meaningless (1/300,000,000,000).  But we don't live in the entire solar system.  We live on one small rocky planet among seven other planets, a few smaller, but most much, much larger than Earth, all orbiting a star that contains well over 99% of all the mass in the system.  The entirety of Earth, and for that matter every other planet and orbiting body in the solar system, could be swallowed by the sun and it wouldn't even register as a blip as far as the sun was concerned.  To put that in some perspective of its own, the video below provides a graphical representation of our size in the solar system, and also shows just how diverse even our own solar system is.



Feel pretty insignificant now?  Well our sun is pretty darn big compared to Earth, but that is nothing compared to some other stars in our neighborhood.

Relative sizes of the planets in the solar system and several well known stars.
CC image originally created by Dave Jarvis.

Our entire civilization, every species of plant and animal, every known living organism, is a tiny dot on a tiny dot on a tiny dot. And that is only what we can see. What is beyond our telescopes is up to the imagination.  Mankind will be learning about the universe and our place in it for millions of years at least, assuming we survive that long.  Everyone should take the time to look up at the night sky to ponder just how remarkably huge it really is, where humans stand in the grand scheme of things, and sober up to the fact that we have a limited amount of time on this planet and in this solar system.  Yes, we are still looking at hundreds of millions of years into the future, but that is a blink of an eye on galactic time scales.  I have thought about this hundreds of times throughout my life, and I still struggle to grasp the reality of it all.