Neighborhood

 he immortal Monty Python, in their famous song The Galaxy song, humorously talk about the nothingness of man in the vast, dark and cold universe. However, a satirical song can hardly capture the place of man in the universe. And man as a man - has divided infinity in order to better understand it. As we know since the days of the meager and atrocious education system - the earth is the third planet in a row in the solar system, which until recently consisted of nine and today of eight planets, after the disqualification of distant Pluto from the team. Here we already reach the limit of knowledge obtained through the medium of the monotonous voice of a random teacher and go further.

The solar system extends over some fifty Astronomical Units (one astronomical unit is the distance between the Sun and the Earth or 150 million kilometers) which comes to approximately 7.5 billion kilometers, more or less. Leaving the solar system, we leave kilometers behind because they do no more work and move on to Light Years (the distance light travels in one year). We leave parsecs to astronomers.

Our modest Solar System was just part of a cloud of stars and at least 200 other solar systems about 30 light years across. That is our slightly more distant neighborhood. The cloud in turn was part of the Local Bubble with various clouds of stars/solar systems over some 800 light years. A collection of several local bubbles formed a belt of bubbles called the Gould Belt and stretched for at least 3000 light years.

Next we come to the Orion Branch as a collection of bubbles and belts 10,000 light years across and as an integral part of the Milky Way galaxy, a modest galaxy of 100,000 light years. Together with several galaxies that gravitated towards it, it formed a subgroup of galaxies 2.7 million light-years across. That subgroup was part of a group of 54 galaxies spanning 10 million light-years known as the Local Group.

Several local groups formed a Cluster of galaxies, we have been in the Virgo Cluster (over 1500 galaxies across 54 million light-years) which in turn was part of the Virgo Supercluster which in turn was a collection of clusters of galaxy groups and had at least 100 clusters of galaxies across its roughly 120 million light-years...The Virgo Supercluster was an integral part of the Lanicae Megacluster, which consisted of a multitude of superclusters and had at least 100,000 galaxies spread across 520 million light-years. Lanikea is the last division, as an integral part of the Universe, at least the one whose shape and size are assumed to be known across 13.8 billion light years and which contains over 100 billion galaxies as part of the complete Universe.

And that, in turn, may be just one of the trillions of existing Universes...If time is added to space (and it cannot be otherwise), then we arrive at at least four billion years of vicissitudes, coincidences and coincidences on Earth and in our Solar System alone that resulted in the emergence of life and finally of course - Man, a completely new phenomenon with his 200,000 years of existence.

I don't know about you, but such information does not seem depressing to me nor does it make me feel insignificant. On the contrary, we are all an extremely rare situation in the Universe and perhaps it is high time to give up as a species the trivialities that dominate the short-lived stay of each individual in this reality. It's clearly impossible and I just hope, I would even say I'm rooting for us not to be the only self-aware species in the Universe because that would be, to paraphrase Carl Sagan - a truly insane waste of space.

No, seriously...I hope Mitre from Resen isn't the highest life form in the Universe.

(Roger Mortis, 139)