bottom bottom Ronnie this is Earth you live here on this planet somewhere and everything
that you've ever known is located right here but just how small exactly is earth when compared to
the scale of the entire universe let's start by zooming out to where we can see our nearest
Cosmic neighbor the moon you may think that the Moon is very close to Earth since it dominates
our night skies but in reality the moon isn't this close to our planet it's actually about
this far away on average about yeah I was about to say 380 000 kilometers it's about the distance
you drive over the lifetime of a car you could get 400 300 to 400 000 kilometers out and in a
car and you you could have driven to the Moon 384 400 kilometers away from you right now on average
just a little fun thing do you know when the moon is on the horizon
uh you know how it looks bigger and then when it's directly above it looks smaller
which is weird because when it's uh above when it looks smaller it's actually closer and then
when it's on the horizon it looks bigger but it's actually further and the difference in change it
actually varies in like significantly like the the it comes significantly closer so it's kind
of strange why does it look bigger on the horizon an optical illusion you could fit 30 entire Earths
in between this distance and if you somehow were able to drive a car at a constant 100 kilometers
per hour speed it would take you about 160 days to drive the entire distance despite this incredible
distance however 12 humans have actually set foot here representing the furthest away that
any individual human has ever been away from the earth and one of Humanity's greatest achievements
this is what the Earth would look like from there if you were standing there with them
and if you wanted to communicate with somebody back at home it would take a message about two
and a half seconds to travel between you and them since that's how fast the speed of light
can travel at this is a photo that was taken on Mars and that tiny dot that you see there is Earth
as seen from the Martian's surface on average Mars is an incredible 225 million kilometers
away from Earth but that distance can be as high as 401 million kilometers that means that
whenever Humanity finally gets around to Landing a human on the planet that person will be 986 times
further away from Earth than the astronauts who landed on the moon were in addition the
time delay for enmay Elon I can't do it here any longer with all these hairless primates
sending a message from Mars back to Earth isn't just two and a half seconds it's actually more
like 20 minutes each Direction which would render instant communication in the event of an emergency
impossible when we zoom out even further away we can find the Voyager 1 space probe which is
the furthest away man-made object from Earth it is currently located 138 Aus from the earth a u
meaning astronomical unit which is the distance between the Earth and the sun which means that
Voyager 1 is 138 times further away from us than the sun is at some point on its long
Voyage Voyager 1 turned its camera around and took this Photograph it may not look like much at first
but in my opinion this is the greatest single photograph ever taken in all of human history
this tiny pale blue dot is Earth and I don't think that anybody has ever said something as
amazing about this as Carl Sagan when he said if you look at it you see a DOT that's here
that's how home that's us on it everyone you ever heard of every human being who ever lived lived
out their lives the aggregate of all our Joys and sufferings thousands of confident religions
ideologies and economic doctrines every Hunter and every forager every hero and coward every
Creator and destroyer of civilizations every King and every peasant every young couple in
love every hopeful child every mother and every father every 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 there on a moat of dust suspended in a Sunbeam
very good editing I've seen many versions of this and this is right up there that was beautiful I
think there is a better version on YouTube you just type in Carl Sagano has his voice talking
about it and the visuals but that was very nice Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 17 kilometers
every single second but even at that speed it won't break out of the reach of our solar
system for another 30 000 years once we go beyond the solar system we arrive in our Interstellar
neighborhood here we shift to the light year unit so that's debatable you know like the all cloud
is yeah I agree it's like the solar system but the you know scientific consensus people think
other things you know some people think they're voyages are already outside our solar system you
know just beyond this little bit all cloud is like this uh theoretical shell of like stuff
that was around you know from the formation of our solar system and it's like spherical and
there's like all this debris out there like like asteroids comets and when you know stars go by
because this thing's actually like a quarter of the way I think to the nearest star you know they
they can actually cause like gravitational problems in these areas and they they come
even in here they can force things that way so you can see it our solar system for another 30
000 years once we go beyond the solar system we arrive in our Interstellar neighborhood here we
shift to the light year unit of measurement which is the distance that light travels in a full Earth
year or about 9.461 trillion kilometers the star of Proxima Centauri here is the closest other star
to us other than our sun but it's still 4.24 light years away from us to put that into perspective if
it was heading in the right direction it would still take Voyager 1 over 70 000 years to reach
it in other words if you drove your car at 100 kilometers an hour like in our previous example to
the Moon it would take over six times longer than the entire age of the universe is just to finally
get there and it wouldn't even exist still when you arrived when we zoom out even further we can
see the entire Milky Way galaxy inside of which Earth is located right here this yellow dot is
the furthest extent of Humanity's radio broadcasts throughout history which means that any possible
and we think we can just spec like there's so many physicists and scientists and just people
who think we can potentially understand if there's life in this whole thing that's as far as our
signals have spread since we started sending you know TV signals into space you've seen the movie
uh contact written by Carl Sagan as well you know he showed the first uh transmission was actually
from Hitler and uh you know the Olympic Games at that time that they actually broadcast Humanity's
radio broadcasts throughout history which means that any possible aliens who live outside of this
range are totally unaware of Humanity's presence it's complete silence outside of this yellow dot
as far as we when you hear people say oh we would have heard back by now this is how far
we've reached it's like yeah we know a bit about the Galaxy it's like yeah we're looking yeah we
think we've figured a lot out and stuff we have no idea what dark matter is and that's kind of
like most of the mass of this thing we don't know what Dark Energy even is there's so much stuff in
here we don't know about pretty much everything we see in the sky is a small little region of
this place it's crazy man people got to be more humble range are totally unaware of Humanity's
presence it's complete silence outside of this yellow dot as far as we are currently aware but
the entire galaxy spans over 100 000 light years from end to end there are 100 000 light years from
end to end there are over 100 billion still you haven't seen what our galaxy looks like
by the way because we're in it right so we yeah we will be able to put some simulations together
from all our things and that's how we've tried to understand what it looks like but it's not
like we can just fly out here and take a picture of it 100 000 light years from end to end there
are over 100 billion stars and over 100 billion planets inside of our galaxy but you have planets
as an estimate we don't know this number yet you know it looks like pretty much every Star is a
planet who knows how many planets as well why do we think we're special we have a very average stop
I I'm gonna take a guess I'm gonna say we're just average right so every Star probably has about
the same amount of planets we do it'd be silly to think otherwise for all the stars like ours
which is an average star I'm gonna guess there's about eight planets and guess what there's life on
our planet um obviously we can see exoplanets now and see where they are if they're in the habitable
zone but who knows that's Life as We Know It life actually might be able to exist in other ways
of course it will right you have never seen the full glory of the Galaxy at night because 99 of
the stars that you can see with the naked eye are limited to the small tiny region right here
but even this massive Galaxy is nothing compared to the rest of what's out there zooming out even
further and we arrive at the local group of galaxies a collection of 54 different galaxies
that is about 10 million light years across but zooming out even further and we can see the Virgo
supercluster of which the local group here is just a tiny segment of there are at least 100
other groups of galaxies just like our own local group inside of here and the distance
from one side to the other is a mind-numbing 110 million light years but even the massive Virgo
supercluster is nothing but a quiet and Tiny lobe of the great lania chaos supercluster an
enormous structure that is home to our galaxy as well as 100 000 other galaxies the distance from
one side to the other is 520 million light years but from even there we can zoom out all the way
to the entire observable universe and see that even the Titanic laniakea supercluster is just
a tiny and insignificant part of everything this is the observable universe that's a nice rock and
it contains everything that we know of it is home to at least 2 trillion different and individual
galaxies which together contain more stars than there are grains of sand on the entire Earth the
distance from Earth to any side of the observable universe is 46.5 billion light years if you're
confused at how you know it can be this long on one side and then another one of that there you
know what I mean like that's a that's much wider than uh you know 13.7 billion years which is that
the age of the universe so if you're wondering how is it only you know existed for 13.7 billion
years and if the speed of light is the limit how is it then you know another 46.5 billion
years just to get to the observable universe on over there and over there and over there what
what's going on there well it has to do with that dark energy stuff that we've just invoked because
we don't really know um so we're like okay you know there's got to be this stuff called dark
energy that is actually expanding the universe so that's what that's what's happened here right the
universe is expanding the expansion is actually increasing we can tell from looking at Supernova
explosions and so the size of the universe is actually this big you know times two and
um even though it's only existed for 13.7 and there is a fundamental speed limit to causality
and Light which means that the entire width is 93 billion light years across what's perhaps
even more interesting however is what actually lies beyond the observable universe keep in mind
that the observable universe is all that we can currently see and it's entirely possible that
the rest of the universe outside of it is vastly larger and more fantastic than we can possibly
ever imagine we simply don't know what else is out there because the light from these incredibly
distant places has not yet had enough time in the universe's history to reach us yet back on earth
and the light from some places may never reach us at all because some parts of space very far away
from Earth are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light that means that the light from
these places will never in an infinite amount of time reach Earth meaning that even if humanity is
eternal and exists forever there will still be an unknown number of places in the universe that we
will never know about or ever see so it is very likely that as unbelievably enormous as it seems
the observable universe is just a tiny slice of what we can currently see of the entire universe
according to the theory of cosmic inflation that was proposed by Dr Alan Guth if it is assumed
that Cosmic inflation began at 10 to the negative 37th of a second after the big bang and with the
assumption that the size of the universe before no it happened before so this is old this is very
old like 40 years we now you know consensus is Cosmic inflation happened before the Big Bang
which sounds weird right so I'll explain at the end um as to it actually provides Credence to
the idea that the Universe might be way bigger and we'll get there and with the assumption that
the size of the universe before inflation began was equal to its age times the speed
of light then this would seem to suggest that at the present day the entire universe is 150
secs yes this is what I was going to tell you guys so um yeah because so before right and uh
we don't know if that inflation actually continued it might have you know from our little observable
pocket we can't tell and so it looks like you know inflation's stopped and you know the Big Bang
happened but it might have just kept going number for reference looks like this with this many zeros
let this number sink in for just a moment this would be similar to you thinking that the entire
observable universe everything that you could see was the size of a light bulb but then realizing
that in reality the entire universe is larger than the former planet of Pluto imagine a light bulb in
the center of Pluto but we inside the light bulb were totally unaware that Pluto existed outside
of it and that's a similar situation to this we are all so unbelievably small but you shouldn't
worry because all that means is that there is so much left out there for us to discover together
that was brilliant like the end of that I love so I don't think I need to add anything on there if
you knew around here you should come check out my uh thing that I'm creating a new kind of VPN that
can literally protect you from quantum computers I'm adding this bit in my friends for the people
watching in the traditional video it's free to use right now comma get it that'll do for that video