We as a race have accomplished so much, but what does it amount to in this inconceivably massive universe? Now don’t get me wrong, our accomplishments are not meaningless. What I’m trying to say is that what we accomplish here is made by one planet, one race, in a universe where we can’t even imagine what else may reside with us. For example, our solar system, the one we are all familiar with, the massive space we live in, where we orbit the sun? It is just one solar system, one sun.
According to astronomers, there are an estimated hundreds of trillions of Solar or Planetary systems in the OBSERVABLE universe. Again, OBSERVABLE, it could be even higher because how much larger the universe really is, and it is infinitely expanding. To further explain how small we are compared to the universe, a black hole 18.2 billion light years away, named TON-618, is 30-40 times larger than our entire solar system, containing 66 billion solar masses. If our universe contains things so large, yet so far away, in a constantly expanding space, what else is out there?
There are two sides of this terrifying coin: We are completely and utterly alone / Something else is out there with us
Since we cannot travel that far into space ourselves safely, NASA launched a drone in 1977 called Voyager 2 that is now 12.7 billion miles away from earth as of May 2025, which is interstellar space, beyond our Sun’s heliosphere. There is also a golden disk playing on the drone containing some of humanity’s most famous songs, with Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry playing on loop. Greetings in 60 different languages and man-made noises are also found on the disk.
We know so little about the universe, and we may never know everything about it. Ever since the Big Bang, the Universe has been endlessly expanding.
