This is so far away from our concept of counting things that the mind just gives up. There's no comparison, no dumbing down to X amount of football fields, just nothing.
I find it depressing, confusing but also inspiring and fascinating at the same time.
Yes, there is so much we can’t possibly know or experience in our lifetimes, perhaps in the span of time our species will exist, to the extent that it becomes easy to imagine ourselves more like bacteria on a speck of dust floating in the air rather than on any scale towards the inverse. We’re incredibly small in size and mental capacity.
In ways the bacteria on the dust are oblivious to the scale and nature of the world around them, we seem similarly lost and hopeless in the pursuit of comprehending the universe. We just weren’t built to grasp this kind of scale. We can enjoy images of the tiniest little slices of it, though. I’m actually very grateful for that. I think it’ll be a source of endless wonder for my entire life.
I heard comparisons of the number of stars in the observable universe to the number of all grains of sand on Earth's beaches, or the number of molecules in a bottle of air. Not sure if that helps anyone, though.
The radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years. The Horsehead Nebula that they zoom into in the video is 0.000001375 billion light-years from Earth. I'm doing mind acrobatics to try to understand the scale but... nope! :)
This is so far away from our concept of counting things that the mind just gives up. There's no comparison, no dumbing down to X amount of football fields, just nothing.
I find it depressing, confusing but also inspiring and fascinating at the same time.