Our True Universal Position
sent to me via email. Original by unknown author

A few months ago, I saw a great article here about the Earth in True Perspective. It really made me think about our place in the universe. I started looking for more information and I ended up finding these great pictures that showed even more details about our solar system, the planets, our galaxy, and the universe as we know it.

Planet Earth - our home

Our solar system - "Sol"

The distance between the Earth and the moon (to scale)

Amazingly, we can fit all of the planets in the solar system in that distance...

The length of Saturn's rings is six times the size of Earth...

If Earth had rings like Saturn, this is how the sky would look like in different parts of the world:

You may have heard that the European Space Agency landed a probe called 'Rosetta' on the Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet. This is that comet, to scale with Los Angeles:

The Earth, as seen from our Moon

The Eartrh as seen from Mars

The Earth as seen from Saturn

That tiny little speck is the Earth, as seen from 4 billion miles away...

That's our Sun with the Earth by comparison

Sunrise on Mars

Our Sun compared with Canis Majoris.  As huge as the sun is, in the universal scale - it's actually tiny. When put next to YV Canis Majoris (one of the largest known stars), it seems smaller than a speck of dust. YV Canis Majoris is 1419 times bigger than the sun!

If you want another scale, imagine the sun is the size of a human white blood cell. Now, staying on that scale - the Milky Way galaxy would be the size of the United States - that's almost incomprehensible

And if you ever wondered - this is where our solar system is in the Milky Way

Despite that, this is all you ever see with the naked eye

Now, let's increase the scale - this is the size of our galaxy, compared to other known galaxies

Now, let's get REALLY BIG - every light you see in this picture is a galaxy. Each galaxy contains hundreds of millions of stars and solar systems. Incredible!

This is galaxy UDF 423, you can see it in the bottom-right part of the picture above. UDF 423 is about 10 billion light years away from earth, meaning that the light needed 10 billion years to get from it to here. What you see is what this galaxy looked like 10 billion years ago!

Now, just to up the ante - the image of the galaxies above was taken from this tiny, seemingly starless spot in the sky

You must have heard of "Black Holes", right? Well, in the center of galaxy NGC 1277 there is a supermassive black hole. If you need to know what "supermassive" means, look at its scale, compared to Earth's orbit around the Sun

So lets have a final recap - This is Earth, our home

It certainly puts into perspective just how totally small and insignificant we are. Here is our microcosm of life - if the Universe could be imagined as our solar system which was filled with sand. We would be as insignificant as one single grain, totally invisible and yet we have this impression that there is contactable life out there, somewhere. The chances of us actually making contact is miniscule, not taking into account of our legends about little grey men. And the chances of us being spotted in all that 'sand' is even less than miniscule.