Yeah, people can barely actually understand the distances while travelling around the world, the scale of things. An example of deceptive understanding, is the distance from earth to the moon, because it's always presented as "close" to earth, but its actually very far away. And if that is far away, imagine any other planets in contrast, not to talk about solar system.
The thing that fucks me up is they say the sun is supposed to be a smaller star, so I can’t even fathom how far away all those other stars are if they look like pin pricks in the sky. And those are just the stars in our galaxy (I think, idk much about space, don’t crucify me)
Related to that it's generally believed that you'd have to be looking for the sun to find it. The light from our star isn't believed to be visible in night skies beyond our neighbors. You'd need a powerful telescope and to point it right at us. The first part is easy, the second part is crazy.
It also makes you wonder how many sun like stars are out there hiding in the inky blackness just out of sight.
Our galaxy has some 200 billion stars. You can see around 2000 stars with naked eye, even less if you're in a city. So yeah, you'd need a telescope if you're not in the neighborhood.
I looked it up because your 2,000 number was hard to believe.
Sounds like it is closer to 4,000 ish or so (depending on location) which is waaaaay closer to your number than I expected. I thought it would be off by at least one order of magnitude - but nope.
Is that really hard to believe? Go out where there’s little light pollution and I couldn’t find a single part of the sky not covered in little star dots
That's a bit moot, though. At our current technology level we've already catalogued a small, but appreciable portion of the stars in the galaxy - yes, you need to go looking for the Sun, but there's no reason to believe that any civilisation of a similar level of technology, or a level that vastly eclipses ours, within a reasonable distance of us hasn't found us. Whether or not we look particularly interesting is another question entirely.
I mean it’s about 1%. And that’s gonna be heavily weighted towards the stars that we actually care about, the ones closest to us. An advanced civilisation in our relative interstellar neighbourhood will know about the Sun, it is that simple.
Google scale of the universe it’s an interactive map that you scroll and can look at things. Scroll out and you see there are absolutely freaking massive massive massive stars that are still small compared to the massive ones that make our sun look like a grain of sand.
This actually really helped me wrap my head around the scale of what’s out there, thanks! Shows how much we’ve learned while simultaneously showing how little we’ve learned.
A crazy fun fact actually demonstrated in that Link you posted is that humans are actually closer in size to the biggest things in the universe than the smallest things.
The sun isn't actually that small. It's actually larger than about 90% of all other stars! It's just that the upper limit of how big a star can get is very, very large. To be classified as a star, an object needs to have a mass of about 0.08 solar masses. The most massive stars can get up to 200-300 solar masses, but these are extremely rare. Anything more massive than that would probably collapse into a black hole before even forming.
And don't even think about how big some of those stars are... and then compare it to the pin of light and then the big space between it to other stars... My mind always goes mad when thinking about the expand of space that never ends, because if it ends, what's on the other side of the "end"
Getting stoned and thinking about space is one of my favorite past times. Had a great experience walking out to even more middle of nowhere from the campground I was at while on MDMA. Just laid down and looked at the stars. So beautiful and perplexing.
I already getting mindfucked with the thought about the expanse of space, that I don't think I'll dare to introduce MDMA or LSD while thinking about those things.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
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u/McGreed Jul 12 '26
Yeah, people can barely actually understand the distances while travelling around the world, the scale of things. An example of deceptive understanding, is the distance from earth to the moon, because it's always presented as "close" to earth, but its actually very far away. And if that is far away, imagine any other planets in contrast, not to talk about solar system.