We Are A Cosmic Speck

You know that feeling, you've had a crap day, your tired, gritty eyes and thinking a little tipple would go down a treat but it's a bloody Monday and you need to be on the ball tomorrow......

So you go for a walk in the countryside, sit on a log and look up at the sky.........It then hits you, this day really is not bad in the grand scheme of things, we populate a tiny planet, in a tiny solar system within one of a myriad of galaxies that in turn sits in one of an unknown amount of super clusters in the observable universe........You feel appeased and decide to head on back.........

Me being me I go home and want facts and figures to justify my better mood and new universal appreciation.......

The Observable Universe is roughly 93 billion light years in diameter and we can see 46.5 billion light years in any direction

The Observable Universe has roughly 2 trillion galaxies

There are roughly 100 billion stars in each Galaxy

There are roughly 200 Sextillion Solar Systems and a very conservative estimate is for the same number of planets

If one in a billion Sun like stars has an earth sized planet in the habitable zone that would mean there is 20 billion planets in the Observable Universe that could have life on them


Now, if we magically stopped the universe from expanding and wanted to travel to the edge of the observable universe and could only (yeah "only"...) travel at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) it would take us roughly......

16.94 billion billion days
4.633 quadrillion years
46.33 trillion centuries


Blows my mind........and also puts into perspective how really short those bad days really are.....

Thank you for the existential crisis , i will now go drink excessive amounts of whiskey .

I don't have that much time, so I'll travel through wormholes