Be thankful, happy, amazed!

 

Have you looked up lately?

I can't help but be amazed by the universe.. It's huge! I mean...... HUGE!!! I guess you could look at it and realize that the problems we let plague our days in comparison are sooo insignificant relative to it's size.. Or you could look at it and think how important or lucky we really are to even be alive.

As a bit of a reference to the size of our universe here's something interesting..Voyager 1 is a shuttle launched by NASA to study our solar system, it's also currently the fastest man made object. It travels at a staggering 17.07 km/s, or 61,452 kilometers per hour (38,185 mph). Yet even at this speed it will not reach the nearest star to our solar system (Alpha Centuri) for 134,433.2 years...

Think about that for a second.. That's the next closest star to our sun..

Based on current estimates, there are about 1,000 stars to every grain of sand on Earth!! There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies. So taking a conservative number of 100 billion stars per galaxy gives an approximate total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. (Which is 10 sextillion)..

That should have blown your mind!!!Remember that we are talking about getting to the closest star which is roughly 4.3 light years away.. The universe itself or at least the region visible from Earth (the observable universe) is about 92 billion light years across.. And most theories about the nature of the universe agree that it is most likely expanding constantly at the speed of light.. Which means it truly could be infinite.

I know this is a lot of stats and probably most of you won't read all this but the point is we are but a spec, a tiny yet beautiful planet in this vast expanse that we call the universe.. We are the perfect distance from our sun for life.. We are more than lucky.. Life is a miracle. Take a deep breath and thank God for the gift of it all, most of which we can't even comprehend.

So if you are driving to work and you spill your coffee, please just look up at the sky and remember how small and lucky you are to exist at all..