Let’s break down the cosmic address that will vaporize your sense of place:
Your Planet: Earth.
Your Star System: One of an estimated 200 billion stars in the Milky Way.
Your Galactic Neighborhood: Swimming in a sea of roughly 3.2 trillion planets within our single galaxy.
Your Universe: The Milky Way is itself just 1 of about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
You are not just a speck on a speck. You are a speck on a speck in an ocean of specks, in a universe that is itself an ocean of oceans.
The math isn't just big; it's existentially violent. It means for every single grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are more than 40,000 planets in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of two trillion similar islands of stars.
This is the ultimate exercise in scale. Every human conflict, every personal worry, every recorded history has taken place on one fragile world that is statistically less than nothing in a cosmos of uncountable nothings.
Yet, here you are, a conscious being on that one-in-trillions world, able to comprehend this vast, beautiful, and indifferent scale. That might be the most mind-blowing fact of all. In an ocean of 3.2 trillion planets, you are on the one (so far) that knows it’s floating in an ocean.