One can count the sun’s rays, but it is impossible to count the number of universes that exist.
“Author unknown”
How big is the universe compared to our reality?
How big is the Universe compared to the reality around us ?
To get a better idea of distances, it is best to make a scale model where each million kilometres is represented by one centimetre.
Starting from the Earth, the Moon is 3 mm away and the Sun is 1.5 m away.
The planet Jupiter is 7.78 m away and Pluto is about 59 m away.
We have to travel 410 km before we meet Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.
At this point, however, the scale used to place the Solar System in the Galaxy is no longer valid.
Everything has to be reduced so that one centimetre represents 100,000,000 km.
In this new representation, the Sun is a small sphere, 14 hundredths of a millimetre in diameter, and the Earth is a tiny speck of dust, invisible to the naked eye, orbiting it at a distance of 1.5 cm.
The nearest star is just over 4 km away, while the entire Milky Way is contained in a disk 92,570 km across.
The Magellanic clouds (two “small” satellite galaxies of the Milky Way) will have diameters of 30,850 and 13,270 km and will be 154,285 and 185,140 km away, respectively.
To reach M 31 Andromeda, the closest of the billions of galaxies in the Universe, a gap of 2,160,000 km must be crossed.
A huge distance, more than 5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
These are the real proportions of distances.
In other words, on the basis of these results and using these proportions, it is possible to say that of the 2,160,000 km that separate us from Andromeda, man has materially crossed the first 4\1000 mm. and with the probes he has built, the first 70 cm.
If we take all this into account, we can understand how small we are compared to the reality around us.
