How the Universe is Way Bigger Than You Think

This is a Real-Life Lore video madepossible by Squarespace. Make your nextmove with a beautiful website from Squarespace. This is Earth. You live here on this planet somewhere and everythingthat you’ve ever known is located right here,but just how small exactly is Earthwhen compared to the scale of the entire universe?Let’s start by zooming out towhere we can see our nearest cosmic neighbor, The Moon. You may think that themoon is very close to Earth since itdominates our night skies. But in realitythe 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 entireEarths in between this distance and ifyou somehow were able to drive a car ata constant 100 km/h speed, it would takeyou about 160 days to drive the entire distance. Despite this incredible distance however,12 humans have actually set foot hererepresenting the farthest away that anyindividual human has ever been away fromthe Earth and one of humanity’s greatest achievements. This is what the Earthwould look like from there, if you werestanding there with them. And if you wanted to communicate with somebody backat home, it would take a message about2 1/2 seconds to travel betweenyou and them since that’s how fast thespeed of light can travel at. This is a photo that was taken on Mars and thattiny dot that you see there is Earth asseen from the Martian surface. On average, Mars is an incredible 225million kilometers away from Earth butthat distance can be as high as 401 million kilometersThat means that whenever humanity finally gets around tolanding a human on a planet,that person will be 986 times further awayfrom Earth than the astronauts wholanded on the moon were. In addition the time delay for sending a message fromMars back to Earth isn’t just two and ahalf seconds, it’s actually more like 20minutes each direction. Which would render instant communication in theevent of an emergency impossible. When we zoom out even further away we can findthe Voyager 1 space probe,which is the farthest away man-made object from Earthit is currently located 138 AU’s from The Earth. AU meaning astronomical unit,which is the distance between theEarth and the Sun,which means that Voyager 1is 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 looklike much at first, but in my opinionthis is the greatest single photographever taken in all of human history. This tiny pale blue dot is Earth and I don’tthink that anybody has ever saidsomething as amazing about thisas 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 thehistory of our species lived there,on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. “Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 17kilometers every single second, but evenat that speed it won’t break out of thereach 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 isthe distance that light travels in afull earth year or about 9. 461 trillion kilometers. The star Proxima Centauri here,is the closest other star to usother than our Sun, but it’s still 4. 24light-years away from us. To put that into perspective,if it was heading inthe right direction, it would still takeVoyager 1 over 70,000 years to reach it. In other words, if you drove your car at100 kilometers an hourlike in our previous example to The Moon itwould take over six times longer thanthe entire age of the universe isjust to finally get there and it wouldn’teven 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’sradio broadcasts throughout history. Which means that any possible aliens who liveoutside of this range are totallyunaware of humanity’s presence. It’s complete silence outside of this yellowdot as far as we are currently aware, butthe entire galaxy spans over 100,000light-years from end to end. There are over 100 billion stars and over 100billion planets inside of our galaxy, butyou have never seen the full glory ofthe galaxy at night. Because 99% of thestars that you can see with the nakedeye are limited to this small tinyregion right here. But even this massive galaxy is nothingcompared to the rest of what’s out to there. Zooming out even further and wearrive at the local group of galaxies. A collection of 54 different galaxies thatis about 10 million light-years across. But zooming out even further and we cansee the Virgo Supercluster. Of which the local group here is just a tiny segment of. There are at least 100 other groupsof galaxies just like our own localgroup inside of here. And the distance from one side to the other is amind-numbing 110 million light-yearsBut even the massive Virgo supercluster isnothing but a quiet and tiny lobe of thegreat Laniakea Supercluster. An enormous structure that is home to our galaxiesas well as 100,000 other galaxies. The distance from one side to the other is520 million light-years. But from even there, we can zoom out all the way to theentire observable universe and see thateven the Titanic Laniakea Superclusteris 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 least2 trillion different individual galaxies. Which together contain more stars than there are grainsof sand on the entire Earth. The distance from Earth to any side of the observable universeis 46. 5 billion light-years. Which means that the entire widthis 93 billion light-years across. What’s perhaps even more interesting however iswhat actually lies beyond the observable universe. Keep in mind that theobservable universe is all that we can currently see. And it’s entirely possiblethat the rest of the universe outside of itis vastly larger and more fantasticthan we can possibly ever imagine. We simply don’t know what else is out there. Because the light from theseincredibly distant places has not yethad enough time in the universe’shistory to reach us yet, back on Earthand the light from some places may never reach us at all. Because some parts ofspace very far away from Earth areexpanding away from us faster than the speed of light. That means that the lightfrom these places will never in aninfinite amount of time, reach Earth. Meaning that even if Humanity is eternaland exists forever, there will still bean unknown number of places in theuniverse that we will never know about or ever see. So it is very likely thatIt’s unbelievably enormous as it seems,the observable universe is just a tinyslice of what we can currently see ofthe entire universe. According to the Theory of Cosmic Inflation that wasproposed by Dr. Alan Guth. If it is assumed that cosmic inflation began at10 to the -37th of a second after the Big Bangand with theassumption that the size of the universebefore inflation began was equal to itsage times the speed of light. Then this would seem to suggest that at the present day,the entire universe is 150sextillion times larger than theobservable 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 youthinking that the entire observable universe. Everything that you could seewas the size of a light bulb, but thenrealizing that in reality, the entire universeis larger than the former planet of Pluto. Imagine a light bulb in the centerof Pluto, but we inside the light bulbwe’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’tworry, because all that means is thatthere is so much left out there for usto discover together. This video was madepossible by Squarespace. If you’re wanting to create a new website for your next project,Squarespace is the absoluteeasiest way of doing it. I’ve used thembefore for several different projectsand what I think is best about them isthat you don’t need any programmingskills in order to make a beautiful website. It’s incredibly easy and can bedone in just a few minutes and there’salways 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 orreally just about anything. And what’s best of all is that you can get 10% offyour first order by using the code,REALLIFELORE over at squarespace. com/reallifeloreThat also means thatyou’ll be directly supporting my channel. So please go ahead and check them out atsquarespace. com/reallifeloreAs always. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, I sincerelyhope that you’ll share it with a friendor two and give this video either a like or a dislike. You can subscribe to mychannel for content just like this inthe future by clicking here. You can visit my Patreon by clicking here ifyou’re interested in supporting the channel. Watch some older videos of mineby clicking here over on the left. And I hope to see you again next Friday foranother new video then.