Earth has nearly 8 billion people, and each of us is just a tiny, insignificant dot. Now, let’s look broader and see how small we are in the universe.
Sometimes you might think that humanity is the strongest on this planet. We dominate Earth and our living space. But have you ever pondered how our planet fits into the vastness of the universe?
This is our Earth
What science currently understands about the size of the universe reveals to us the vastness and enormity of the cosmos – yet it is still just a very small point, a minuscule dot in the trillions of universes.
The diameter of the Sun is about 100 times that of Earth.
Earth is too small compared to the stars in the Solar System
The largest star we know of is VY Canis Majoris, which is about 2,000 times the size of the Sun, with a diameter of approximately 1.8 billion miles, much larger than the Sun’s diameter of 860,000 miles.
From a human size perspective, if a passenger plane flies at a speed of nearly 900 km/h, it would take about 1,100 years to fly around that star.
Too small compared to the Sun
It is estimated that there are about 100 to 300 billion planets in our galaxy. According to the website “Ask an Astronomer” from Cornell University, astronomer Karen Master states: “Through 3D mapping searches in the universe, we know there are over 100,000 galaxies.” However, the total number of unknown galaxies is about 200 million.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a software engineer who has worked for Microsoft, Google, and Apple, helps us understand how large “a billion” really is. She used approximately 100 billion galaxies in the universe for comparison.
The Milky Way, a medium-sized galaxy, is about 100,000 light-years in size. Therefore, a spacecraft would take 200,000 years to travel, both to and from, at the speed of light.
Watch the video “How small is Earth?” here:
