We ain't so big no more..

(Spitzer's Infrared image of the Milky Way Galaxy)

Have you ever look up at the sky at night and asked yourself, where are we in this vast emptiness of space? Well I do. I don’t know about you, but if you can visualise big numbers, you’d understand what I’m talking about. Let us travel from the start, to the end.

Earth, or as we know it as home, is the only place in the universe where life is known to exist. Life on Earth is abundant, everywhere there’s life. From the deepest ocean to the peak of mountains, there’s certainly life. Earth has only one known satellite; or I’d like to call it, the Moon. Earth is home to everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here.

(The first photograph of an Earthrise by humans.)

Let’s go back to something more down to earth, like our neighbourhood. We all know that there are eight planets in our solar system, and there are another five more dwarf planets, so there is a total of 13 planets in our solar system.
There’s the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, (The Asteroids Belt), Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, (The Kuiper Belt), Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, (The scattered Disk), Eris and the Oort Cloud.
Well that’s just 13 planets, hundreds of moons, The asteroid belts and the other debris from the formation of the Solar System orbiting one star; our Sun.

(The Milky Way as seen from Death Valley.)

Than comes the Local Interstellar Cloud or called the Local Fluff is a cloud where our solar system is in and is moving.
Than next we’re in this Local Bubble, where it sits at the Orion Arm in our Milky Way Galaxy.
The Orion Arm is just one minor spiral arm in our Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is know to harvest approximately 200 billion stars. Our Milky Way galaxy looks like a stream of milk in the night sky, hence it’s name, and our galaxy is one of a 100 billion in the known side of the universe.

(the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 4414, NASA, ESA Hubble Space Telescope)

Our known observable universe is very large, it spreads over a distance of 93 billion light years across of space. Once light year is roughly 9.4 trillion km, or the time light travels in one year.

So where is earth in this emptiness of space? I don’t know.

(The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, is an image of thousands of galaxies)

To me, life here on earth is so small. We’re like ants, digging holes into the earth to make cities. Oblivious to what’s really around us out there. There is so much wonder out there that I myself cannot possibly imagine. Look at it this way, when you sow a seed, how can that small seed turn in to bush of flowers? That one tiny seed, now made colours, sent, and beauty. The next time you see a plant, take a look at it’s leaves. You’d realise how unique and detailed a leave can be. So simple as it is, life can flourish around earth.