Naturally, we find the Earth to be a considerably large mass, and relative to our size, Earth is massive. There are seven billion of us comfortably living all over the planet, accompanied by many other plants and animals. Traveling feels like forever, and it seems impossible to explore everything. However, relative to the universe, Earth is unimaginably small.
In fact, our own Sun makes Earth look irrelevant. The Earth has a diameter of 8,000 miles — huge right? Wrong. The sun’s diameter is about 865,000 miles, which means the sun can hold 1,300,000 Earths within its area, and it would take 1,100 years to circle the sun. But what’s even more astonishing is that the Sun is a fairly average sized star compared to many others. The largest star we are familiar with, VY Canis Majoris, is 9.3 billion times the size of the sun — almost unimaginably large!
That is just the size of some of the largest regular matter of the universe, but regular matter only composes about four percent of the universe — the rest is empty space. Typically, regular matter is gravitationally bound into galaxies, which although they are mostly made of empty space, galaxies are estimated to be composed of around 100 thousand million stars on average. So imagine that singular Sun we consider to be large, and multiply its size by the amount of stars in a galaxy. Then, consider that each star has on average two planets orbiting it. Overall, it would take 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light to reach end to end of our milky way galaxy.
Our singular galaxy is massive, but that is only one. In total, there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in our visible universe, each with around 100 million stars and 200 million planets. Altogether, our observable universe is 46.6 billion light years away, but who is to say there is not more beyond what we can see. For all we know, the universe could go on forever, with infinite many suns, planets, and galaxies.
So yeah, as humans, we are really small — unimaginably small. There is so much distance space around us, so many massive formations rotating gravitationally in countless galaxies, that it is almost difficult to fathom. Next time you are having a bad day, stressing about a minor issue, struggling to start the next task, think about how extremely small all of your problems are in the scheme of the universe — it is a great way to relax.