Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars, it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16 000 light-years thick, but out by us it's just 3 000 light-years wide.
We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point, we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth.
And, here's a link to a couple of charts that give some comparitive distances to help wrap your mind around how REALLY BIG the universe is..
WOW!!!! Thank you! Thats what I was looking for. It is mind boggling. 2,200,000 light years to the nearest large galaxy. Light can travel around the earth 7 times in one second? Dam!! Light is FAST!! And it says they are millions of billions of galaxies. I cannot imagine millions of billions. 15 billion light years to the edge of the known universe.
To put that into somewhat of a context it is
one million seconds = 11 years
one billion seconds = 31 years.
One trillion seconds = 318 centuries
I will have to check out the links on that site. I only saw the main page.
Thanks again