The black hole thread got me thinking about how insignificantly small our planet, our solar system, and our human species are when held against the backdrop of the entire known universe. The picture you see above, taken by the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field camera in 2014, is the equivalent to the size of a pinhead if you held one above your head at arm's length and looked towards the sky. Despite the miniscule angle of the sky that's covered in the photo, there are 5,000+ galaxies imaged here. The reddish ones are the most distant ever imaged by an optical camera, and the light you are seeing was produced just 400M-800M years after the Big Bang. Each of these 5,000+ galaxies, and our own Milky Way, are homes to 500M-1B stars and countless billions of planets. And this picture alone is just a microscopic fraction of what is really out there.
It is humbling to know all of this exists and to not have the means to reach any of it in any way, shape, or form. The Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 spacecraft left Earth in the autumn of 1977. Voyager 1 reached termination shock in December 2004 and Voyager 2 reached termination shock in August 2007. Termination shock is the distance from the Sun where objects are essentially no longer subject to the Sun's gravitational pull and the Sun's solar wind is no longer stronger than the interstellar medium it protects us from. It took 30 years to get only that far. Another 8 years later, in August 2012, Voyager 1 passed beyond the heliosphere and crossed into interstellar space. Voyager 2 did the same in November 2018. This is the line of demarcation where our Sun's solar winds and radiation are too dispersed to be detected. It took 41 years traveling at 35,000 miles per hour just to reach interstellar space. The Voyagers are currently 11+ billion miles from the Sun.
New Horizons launched in early 2006. It reached Pluto in July 2015 and traveled 1 billion additional miles into the Kuiper Belt to fly by Ultima Thule in January 2019. Ultima Thule is the furthest object from our Sun ever to be imaged. New Horizons is currently 4.2 billion miles away. However, it will not reach interstellar space until the year 2038 at the earliest. The loosely defined boundary of interstellar space is at about 19 light minutes from our Sun. The closest solar system to ours is 4.22 light years away (Proxima Centauri). That's 24,807,799,074,834 miles away. At 40,000 MPH, the same approximate speed most man-made deep space spacecraft have traveled, it would take 71,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
TL;DR - you are an insignificant dust speck on the ass of an overwhelmingly huge universe. Have a great day.
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