Barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 (NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO)

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 (NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO)

Space just blows my mind. The thing is the scale. It’s just incomprehensible. We think in terms of kilometers, whether it’s hundreds or millions. But out there, kilometers is meaningless. Light years is the standard measurement, and even then we can be talking about millions of light years…

Take this galaxy here, an image from the Hubble telescope. To get to this scale of the universe, we first have a solar system which is the immediate vicinity around a star and any of its orbiting bodies. A galaxy is a collection of stars (and their accompanying solar systems). But a galaxy has millions of stars. Millions. Each star is like our sun. The closest star to our sun is if I can remember rightly Alpha Centuri and it’s about 4 or 5 light years away? Not sure on the detail here, but it doesn’t really matter. The scale is already incomprehensible and we’re still inside our own galaxy the Milky Way.  This picture is of a completely different galaxy altogether. And there are countless galaxies in the cosmos. Countless. Is that starting to sink in?

Sometimes when you look up in the sky you are seeing single stars. At other times however what you’re seeing are complete galaxies. The Smaller and Larger Magellanic clouds are an example of this. Once you get out in deep space like the Hubble Telescope has, then zillions of galaxies appear, with vast space between them. How vast the cosmos is, as I said, is totally incomprehensible to our tiny brains.

One thing is certain to me. The cosmos is teeming with life, and we are but one tiny planet among untold billions of planets. We just can’t see them. The scale is too big. We can’t pierce the veil of space that is hiding all the other untold billions of solar systems out there.

Sometimes a fragment of understanding comes to me. The scale of it fleetingly dawns on me and then is gone. I can’t hang on to it. It’s just too mind blowing. And the only other thing that comes close to being as mindblowing as the outer direction of the cosmos, is that it goes just as far in the other direction. Whole universes must exist in the microscopic worlds that we also can’t see. Thinking about it in that light, scale is eveything. We all exist together, just in different scales of size and time. Isn’t it amazing to be alive and considering these things.