How small are we compared to the size of the universe? The longer you think about this question, the more mind-blowing the answer becomes. After all, we are just one of many species on Earth. The Earth is a single planet in this galaxy. This galaxy is a single galaxy in this universe. But let’s dive deeper.

For starters, let’s talk about the Earth’s size and use it as a comparison point – on the larger side, over 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. On the other hand, a human is about 7 million times smaller than the Earth. That means that given that 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun, and that there are about 8 billion people on this Earth… well, the math gets crazy. The number of humans that could fit inside the Sun, each standing on their own Earth, would be just around 10,400,000,000,000,000 – or ten quadrillion four hundred trillion. That’s incomprehensible. But that’s not even the beginning.

Let’s zoom out into the galaxy and find another bigger star before we start moving onto the size of galaxies. The largest star we know of is named UY Scuti, whose radius is about 900-1000 times the Sun’s. About 6 quadrillion Earths could fit inside this star (as compared to the Sun’s 1.3 million). That means 48,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 humans could fit inside that star. That’s 48 septillion. Plus, around 5 billion Suns could fit inside UY Scuti itself. And we certainly don’t know of all the stars in the universe, let alone the galaxy.

Now, let’s speak about the galaxy. Specifically, our galaxy, the Milky Way. I want to start off with an insane scale fact – if the Earth was the size of a grain of sand – think about that – that’s one single 1-millimeter-sized grain of sand – the galaxy in which we live would be the size of the whole of North America. And the solar system would be the size of a dinner plate. The Sun itself would be the size of an orange on that plate. Meanwhile, Jupiter, our biggest planet, would be roughly the size of a small grape. Our home is on that plate.

After this, we get to galaxy clusters. I’m not going to go into them in too much detail, but just know that there are more, and definitely bigger, galaxies out there that just add to the craziness of this whole idea. These galaxy clusters make up more larger clusters, and this occurs over and over again until we get to the observable universe. But we don’t know much about how big the real universe is, which is a whole other topic. Is the universe infinite? If it’s not, just how big is it? Where did it all start? If it’s finite, what is outside the universe? Is there a multiverse with infinite universes, where each universe is infinite?

There is so much we truly do not know. But there is one thing we know for sure: we are tiny creatures in a vast sea of galaxies. So, if you ever want to get your mind blown, just think about that, and the fact that there are more questions unanswered that we may never, ever know.