It's absolutely insane, isn't it?
You hear the numbers when you're a kid (which have been massively revised upwards now anyway) and sort of lol it off, but recently I've been reading a lot about it and my mind is somewhat broken. To start with the easier stuff that's boggled my mind:
Our solar system is just one of something like 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, which are home to somewhere between 800 billion and 3.2 trillion planets, with something like six billion of these "earth like".
Then you go further afield and in just the bit of the universe that we can see there are something like two trillion galaxies, with 200 billion trillion stars in them and an amount of planets that, well, it's a lot.
I always thought we lived in the best time of history, but imagine how much more we'll know about all this the next thousand or million years and in that sense it's quite gutting that if I had to be born, it was now. But I suppose on the plus side, maybe we will never understand it properly and given that the universe will supposedly last for 100 trillion years, we'd only be 0.014% through that now and therefore may well be some of the first intelligent creatures to have ever lived, if not the first.
Bit of a ramble I know, but one thing that does seem certain is that with current understanding, it's impossible to make sense of all this. Your thoughts?
