They say perspective is everything. You might look like a giant to an ant but to a blue whale, you would be like a little puppy. It’s all relative when it comes to creation itself.

Similarly, we are often too absorbed in our lives and all its problems that we seldom realise that they mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I think most people on the planet suffer from this myopic view of life where they are so engrossed in their calendar events and to-do lists and the daily hustle and bustle of life that they forget to look up. Up towards the infinite cosmos.

Have you ever wondered about the size of the universe and then contrasted your life and all its little problems with the sheer magnitude of it all? Well, if you haven’t, let me give you a brief lesson.

Your Place In The Cosmos

Image Credits: Andrew Z. Colvin

So, the first line of our address in the cosmos is our very own planet, Earth, our home. Just compare yourself to the magnitude of this planet. The difference is pretty mind-boggling, right? Well, hold on, it’s going to get crazier.

The Earth is one of the eight planets in the Solar system which revolve around the Sun. The Sun itself is so large that 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it. That’s a lot of Earths!

Next, our Sun is just one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy and is situated in one of its outer arms. If you’ve see a photo of the galaxy, you would see that the Sun is barely visible as a tiny dot of light.

Now, our Milky Way galaxy is part of a small group called the Local Group which contains about 54 galaxies. This Local Group is itself a part of a much larger Virgo Supercluster which consists of 100 galaxy groups like our Local Group.

According to a study in 2014, this humongous Virgo Supercluster is just a love of an even greater supercluster called the Laniakea Supercluster, which consists of approximately 100,000 galaxies.

All these superclusters, come together to form the universe. It is estimated that there are a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe alone. Observable universe is the just the spherical region of the universe that we have been able to observe from Earth till now, thanks to the technology we have.

Who knows how big the whole of the universe really is. Maybe the observable universe is just a tiny part of the whole! So, as you see, we, barely exist as far as the universe is concerned.

So, the next time you are feeling overwhelmed by your problems, just think about how unthinkably large the universe is and they will seem like nothing!