22 Mind-Blowing Pictures That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence
When you think about things the world is a completely nuts place. I mean each of us are just transient beings on this planet that’s been about for a bloody long time. For 3000 years if your a fan of the Bible and for a couple million years if you side with Darwin. Either way – bloody long time! But what happens when we’re gone? What’s our size and relevance in the context of the solar system? Just what the f*ck is going on? Well don’t worry, this article will answer all these questions and more.
1. This is Earth (as far as we know the only place humans have ever lived).
2. And this is our local neighbourhood, the solar system.
3. Here’s the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the moon. It looks far, but is it?
4. Nope. You can just about fit every planet in our solar system within that distance.
5. But some of these planets are very large indeed. That green speck you see? That’s what North America would look like on Jupiter.
6. And here’s how the Earth fares next to Saturn. Not very big at all, right?
7. If Earth had Saturn’s rings, the view from the ground would look like this.
8. And to make things even more interesting, here’s what the comet a space shuttle recently landed on would look like on top of Los Angeles.
9. But that’s still nothing considering how small we are compared to our sun.
10. To drive that point home, here’s another comparison.
11. What Earth looks like from the moon.
12. And from Mars.
13. From behind Saturn’s rings.
14. This is the earth beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles away. As Carl Sagan, brilliant put it, “Everyone and everything you have ever known exists on that little speck”.
15. Carl Sagan once famously said that there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth – that’s a fair few then!
16. Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than our relatively tiny sun.
17. The biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, is 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun! Who knew?
18. But none of those come anywhere close to the size of a galaxy. Ready to have your mind blown? Okay, here we go. If you reduced the size of the sun to that of a white blood cell, then reduced the size of the Milky Way galaxy using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the USA.
19. But even our unimaginably massive galaxy is TINY compared with some other much larger galaxies. Here’s the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth.
20. This picture taken by the Hubble telescope reveals that there are thousands of galaxies, each containing MILLIONS of stars, each with their own planets.
21. This is UDF 423, a galaxy which is 10 billion light years away. That means this image, even when viewed in a telescope ‘now’, on earth, is actually 10 billion light years old. Try to wrap your head around that one. Interstellar tried to warn us!
22. But you should also know that all of this is just a fraction of the universe.
23. So to put this all in perspective, let’s look at earth, and then start to zoom out…
Our Solar system…
Prepared? You better be.
Oh boy.
Arghh sh*t…
Getting dizzy.
Passing out.
Woah. There it is. The entire observable universe as we know it.
Mind = blown.
Well my whole world has just been turned upside down! Still trying to wrap my noggin around some of this space hype, but i’m bloody excited. Just like when I discovered these teenagers in crisis who require an intervention immediately. Please share this article with your friends using the buttons below.