The Cosmic Dance: A Journey Through Space and Time
While you read these words, Earth rotates at 1,600 km/h, while the Moon orbits Earth at 3,700 km/h. Together with the other seven planets of our little solar system, we orbit around the Sun at a casual 108,000 km/h. Our solar system itself is rotating around Sagittarius A*, the black hole that pulls the Milky Way together, at 720,000 km/h. It will take 230 million years for our solar system to complete a full cycle.
Meanwhile, the galaxy itself is being pulled towards the Andromeda Galaxy at a speed of 406,800 km/h, and the galaxies will collide in about 4 billion years. Just a casual dance of two galaxies in our local galactic neighborhood, spanning distances of 10 million light-years. Meaning light needs to travel at 300,000 km per second for 10 million years to cover the distance.
And our tiny neighborhood is just an insignificant part of the Virgo Cluster, which is a part of the Laniakea Supercluster. Here we are pushing the 500 million light-year mark. And Laniakea is again just one of many superclusters, being pulled towards the Great Attractor. And that again is just a part of the cosmic web, whose dimensions do not even make sense to mention since the human brain can’t comprehend that anyway.
The observable universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter and expanding. Everything is in motion. At each point in space and time. Over 13 billion years since the Big Bang. Our solar system and Earth itself are about 4.54 billion years old. Comparing the age of Earth to a 24-hour scale, humans appeared at 23:59:56. Four seconds is what humans exist in relation to Earth’s existence.
Comparing an average human life of 80 years to the 300,000 years since humanity exists would mean that a life is proportional to 23 seconds. What are 23 seconds? Each 23 seconds on this planet, 107 children are born, 24 weddings are held, and the universe expands 360 km.
Right this moment, billions of people are living their lives. Each major city is super busy. Tourists taking pictures, friends laughing during dinner, couples falling in and out of love. Carefully embedded in an anthropologically augmented ecosystem with a few other billion species in a perpetual cycle of duality. Be it life and death. Joy and sadness. Peace and war. Health and sickness. Light and darkness. An essential interplay, where one does not exist without the other. Where one is needed to understand the other.
So simple and yet so beautifully incomprehensibly complex. And then there is you. The spectator and participant in this amazing interplay of everything. Enjoy the show, for it is the grandest spectacle the universe has ever known.
