"Welcome to the Sandbox"

did you know:

1. the milky way, our galaxy, has about 400 billion stars and many of them are like are own sun
2. our milky way measures 120,000 light years in diameter
3. our galaxy is a spiral and not an elliptical or dwarf or other
3* our galaxy has a supermassive black hole at it's center, called Sagittarius A*
4. there are 300 to 500 billion galaxies like ours in the universe
5. we can detect the universe stretching out 13.8 billion light years in all directions from our own milky way
6. mathematically we know the universe is at least 47B light years in all directions, that is a minimum but, probably much larger
7. there are more than a septillion stars in what we can detect in the universe, that is 1 followed by 24 zeros
8. our closest star to us, besides our own sun, is 4.22 light years away, proximal centauri
9. using our current technology and saturn and jupiter for gravitational slingshots to attain velocity of 38,000miles/hr, it would take 76,000 years to get there or 2500 human generations.
10. we live in a galaxy we cant travel out of and there are 300+B more of them,.. we certainly are not alone, everyone is stranded like we are, on their own planets.
11. and finally to add another dimension, the entire universe and all its matter is expanding at the rate of 73.8km/sec/Mpc (Megaparsec - unit for measuring
distance to nearby galaxies.
12. so we are not only spinning on our own axis every 24 hours, but rotating around our own star every 365 days but, also traveling with our galaxy and
and our universe at 73.8km/sec/Mpc....makes one feel a bit dizzy.
13. And in 4 Billion years our galaxy will collide with our closest galaxy the Andromeda, 2.4 million light years away. The Andromeda galaxy is approaching ours at a rate
of 250,000 mph due to gravitational pull. once the galaxies begin the process of colliding it will take another 2 Billion years to complete the mega galaxy merger. Hold on!!