How small are we?
We surely don’t have a thing… on any of the Who’s in Whoville.  I’ll tell you that much right now  And who the heck knows who our Horton is……
Seriously.  We are miniscule.  Little. Itsy-Bitsier than the spider on the downspout.

Oh we humans.  We have a sun,  oh yes we do.  BIG sun.  And 9 planets, well 8 planets now… circle the deal.  Our Solar System.

But consider this…..  we are just a little piece of that old Galactic Candy Bar… The Milky Way.

According to Astronomers (and THEY would know), our Milky Way is an average-sized spiral galaxy.  Average…. meaning it measures….. up to 120,000 light-years across.
Our Sun is located about 27,000 light-years from the galactic core….. in the Orion arm of all that mess.

And those same pesky Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way contains up to 400 billion stars of various sizes and brightness.  Little reminder…. Our SUN is ONE of those STARS.

There are spiral galaxies out there with more than a trillion stars, and giant elliptical galaxies with 100 trillion stars.

And there are tiny dwarf galaxies with a fraction of our number of stars.

Yeah..  And get this….. there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe.

And here we are.  On a little blue ball…. in all of that.
And most of us little humans think we are the ONLY life forms.
Heck.  Some little humans think that the universe revolves around them.

Oh.  It is easy to get “caught up” in all the daily “thickness” of our lives.  That is what we know.  It is…. after all… our existence.

I do it.  You do it.  We all do it.  Our world is formed by our own perception of it.  A very strange phenomenon…. that we have these 7 trillion perspectives  buzzing around…. bumping in to one another.

Sometimes though…..  I find it necessary every now and again, to realize just how small I am…. in the bigger scheme of things.  One in 7 trillion…..  on a ball spinning around a star….. one of 170 billion stars…..
…. as I look up into the dark of the night sky.

“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” – Paul Ricoeur