How the Universe is Way Bigger Than You Think


This is a Real-Life Lore video made possible by Squarespace. Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace. This is Earth. You live here on this planet somewhere and everything that you’ve ever known is located right here, but just how small exactly is Earth when compared to the scale of the entire universe? Let’s start by zooming out to where we can see our nearest cosmic neighbor, The Moon. You may think that the moon is very close to Earth since it dominates our night skies. But in reality the moon isn’t this close to our planet, it’s actually about this far away. 384,400 kilometers away from you right now on average. You could fit 30 entire Earths in between this distance and if you somehow were able to drive a car at a constant 100 km/h speed, it would take you about 160 days to drive the entire distance. Despite this incredible distance however, 12 humans have actually set foot here representing the farthest away that any individual human has ever been away from the Earth and one of humanity’s greatest achievements. This is what the Earth would look like from there, if you were standing there with them. And if you wanted to communicate with somebody back at home, it would take a message about 2 1/2 seconds to travel between you and them since that’s how fast the speed of light can travel at. This is a photo that was taken on Mars and that tiny dot that you see there is Earth as seen from the Martian surface. On average, Mars is an incredible 225 million kilometers away from Earth but that distance can be as high as 401 million kilometers That means that whenever humanity finally gets around to landing a human on a planet, that person will be 986 times further away from Earth than the astronauts who landed on the moon were. In addition the time delay for sending a message from Mars back to Earth isn’t just two and a half seconds, it’s actually more like 20 minutes each direction. Which would render instant communication in the event of an emergency impossible. When we zoom out even further away we can find the Voyager 1 space probe, which is the farthest away man-made object from Earth it is currently located 138 AU’s from The Earth. AU meaning astronomical unit, which is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which means that Voyager 1 is 138 times further away from us than the Sun is. At some point on its long voyage, Voyager 1 turned its camera around and took this photograph. It may not look like much at first, but in my opinion this is the greatest single photograph ever taken in all of human history. This tiny pale blue dot is Earth and I don’t think that anybody has ever said something as amazing about this as Carl Sagan when he said, “If you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every hunter and every forager. Every hero and coward. Every creator and destroyer of civilizations. Every king and every peasant. Every young couple in love. Every hopeful child. Every mother and every father. Every inventor and explorer. Every teacher of morals. Every corrupt politician. Every superstar. Every Supreme Leader. Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 17 kilometers every single second, but even at that speed it won’t break out of the reach of our solar system for another 30,000 years. Once we go beyond the solar system, we arrive in our interstellar neighborhood. Here we shift to the Lightyear unit of measurement which is the distance that light travels in a full earth year or about 9.461 trillion kilometers. The star Proxima Centauri here, is the closest other star to us other than our Sun, but it’s still 4.24 light-years away from us. To put that into perspective, if it was heading in the right direction, it would still take Voyager 1 over 70,000 years to reach it. In other words, if you drove your car at 100 kilometers an hour like in our previous example to The Moon it would take over six times longer than the entire age of the universe is just to finally get there and it wouldn’t even exist still when you arrived. When we zoom out even further, we can see the entire Milky Way galaxy. Inside of which, Earth is located right here. This yellow dot is the farthest extent of humanity’s radio broadcasts throughout history. Which means that any possible aliens who live outside of this range are totally unaware of humanity’s presence. It’s complete silence outside of this yellow dot as far as we are currently aware, but the entire galaxy spans over 100,000 light-years from end to end. There are over 100 billion stars and over 100 billion planets inside of our galaxy, but you have never seen the full glory of the galaxy at night. Because 99% of the stars that you can see with the naked eye are limited to this small tiny region right here. But even this massive galaxy is nothing compared to the rest of what’s out to there. Zooming out even further and we arrive at the local group of galaxies. A collection of 54 different galaxies that is about 10 million light-years across. But zooming out even further and we can see the Virgo Supercluster. Of which the local group here is just a tiny segment of. There are at least 100 other groups of galaxies just like our own local group inside of here. And the distance from one side to the other is a mind-numbing 110 million light-years But even the massive Virgo supercluster is nothing but a quiet and tiny lobe of the great Laniakea Supercluster. An enormous structure that is home to our galaxies as well as 100,000 other galaxies. The distance from one side to the other is 520 million light-years. But from even there, we can zoom out all the way to the entire observable universe and see that even the Titanic Laniakea Supercluster is just a tiny and insignificant part of everything. This is the observable universe and it contains everything that we know of. It is home to at least 2 trillion different individual galaxies. Which together contain more stars than there are grains of sand on the entire Earth. The distance from Earth to any side of the observable universe is 46.5 billion light-years. Which means that the entire width is 93 billion light-years across. What’s perhaps even more interesting however is what actually lies beyond the observable universe. Keep in mind that the observable universe is all that we can currently see. And it’s entirely possible that the rest of the universe outside of it is vastly larger and more fantastic than we can possibly ever imagine. We simply don’t know what else is out there. Because the light from these incredibly distant places has not yet had enough time in the universe’s history to reach us yet, back on Earth and the light from some places may never reach us at all. Because some parts of space very far away from Earth are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. That means that the light from these places will never in an infinite amount of time, reach Earth. Meaning that even if Humanity is eternal and exists forever, there will still be an unknown number of places in the universe that we will never know about or ever see. So it is very likely that It’s unbelievably enormous as it seems, the observable universe is just a tiny slice of what we can currently see of the entire universe. According to the Theory of Cosmic Inflation that was proposed by Dr. Alan Guth. If it is assumed that cosmic inflation began at 10 to the -37th of a second after the Big Bang and with the assumption that the size of the universe before inflation began was equal to its age times the speed of light. Then this would seem to suggest that at the present day, the entire universe is 150 sextillion times larger than the observable universe. That number for reference looks like this. With this many zeros, let this number sink in for just a moment. This would be similar to you thinking that the entire observable universe. Everything that you could see was the size of a light bulb, but then realizing that in reality, the entire universe is larger than the former planet of Pluto. Imagine a light bulb in the center of Pluto, but we inside the light bulb we’re totally unaware that Pluto existed outside of it. And that’s a similar situation to this. We are all so unbelievably small, but you shouldn’t worry, because all that means is that there is so much left out there for us to discover together. This video was made possible by Squarespace. If you’re wanting to create a new website for your next project, Squarespace is the absolute easiest way of doing it. I’ve used them before for several different projects and what I think is best about them is that you don’t need any programming skills in order to make a beautiful website. It’s incredibly easy and can be done in just a few minutes and there’s always somebody to call 24/7 if you ever need any help. You can create a blog, a store, a page for your music or art or really just about anything. And what’s best of all is that you can get 10% off your first order by using the code, REALLIFELORE over at squarespace.com/reallifelore That also means that you’ll be directly supporting my channel. So please go ahead and check them out at squarespace.com/reallifelore As always. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, I sincerely hope that you’ll share it with a friend or two and give this video either a like or a dislike. You can subscribe to my channel for content just like this in the future by clicking here. You can visit my Patreon by clicking here if you’re interested in supporting the channel. Watch some older videos of mine by clicking here over on the left. And I hope to see you again next Friday for another new video then.

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