You’re sitting on a chair right now. Probably holding a phone or staring at a monitor. It feels solid. It feels like the "real" world. But if you start zooming out of the universe even just a little bit, that feeling of solid reality starts to evaporate pretty fast.
It’s a weird mental exercise.
Most people think of space as just a lot of "nothing" between planets. But the scale isn't just big; it's practically offensive to the human brain. We aren't evolved to understand these distances. Our ancestors needed to know how far a spear could fly or how long it took to walk to a watering hole. They didn't need to know that the light hitting their eyes from the Andromeda Galaxy actually started its journey two and a half million years ago.
The first few steps away from home
Let’s start small. If you zoom out just enough to see the Earth and the Moon at the same time, you realize something most textbooks get wrong. Those diagrams showing the Moon hugging the Earth? Lies. Total fiction. You could actually fit every single other planet in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, the whole gang—into the gap between us and the Moon. There would still be room left over.
Space is mostly just... space.
Once you pass the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, things get lonely. The Voyager 1 probe has been hauling tail at 38,000 miles per hour since 1977. It's the furthest human-made object. Yet, in the grand scheme of zooming out of the universe, it hasn't even left our front porch. To reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, it would need another 70,000 years.
The Milky Way is a ghost town
When you zoom out further, the Sun disappears. It’s just one of 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Think about that number. If you counted one star every second, it would take you over 3,000 years just to finish our galaxy.
We used to think the Milky Way was the whole deal. Back in the early 1900s, astronomers like Harlow Shapley argued that the "spiral nebulae" we saw in telescopes were just clouds of gas inside our own neighborhood. Then Edwin Hubble—the man, not the telescope—proved everyone wrong. He used Cepheid variables to show that Andromeda was its own "island universe."
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It turns out we live in a massive, spinning disk of stars, gas, and dark matter about 100,000 light-years across. But even this is just a speck.
Entering the Laniakea Supercluster
This is where it gets truly unsettling. If you keep zooming out, galaxies start to look like grains of sand. They clump together in groups. Our "Local Group" includes us, Andromeda, and about 50 other smaller satellite galaxies.
But even groups belong to bigger structures.
In 2014, a team led by R. Brent Tully at the University of Hawaii defined our home supercluster: Laniakea. It means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian. It contains 100,000 galaxies. When you see a map of Laniakea, it doesn't look like stars. It looks like a nervous system. Long filaments of light stretching toward a point called the Great Attractor.
Everything in our local 500 million light-year radius is being pulled toward this mysterious gravitational anomaly. We can’t even see what it is because the "Zone of Avoidance"—the dusty plane of our own galaxy—blocks the view.
The edge of the "Observable" universe
Here is the part that usually trips people up. There is a limit to how much zooming out of the universe we can actually do. It’s called the Observable Universe.
Because the universe has a finite age (about 13.8 billion years) and light has a speed limit, there is a literal "horizon" beyond which we cannot see. Light from objects further than that simply hasn't had time to reach us yet.
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However, the observable universe isn't 13.8 billion light-years wide. It's actually about 93 billion light-years across.
How? Because the universe is expanding. While the light was traveling toward us, the space through which it was traveling was stretching. Imagine an ant crawling across a rubber band while you pull both ends. The ant has to cover more ground than it started with.
Why we are probably in a "Multiverse"
What’s outside that 93-billion-light-year bubble?
Probably more universe. Most cosmologists, like Alan Guth (who pioneered the theory of Cosmic Inflation), suspect the universe is either infinite or so large that our "observable" part is like a single atom in the context of the Earth.
If inflation is true, different "pockets" of space might have stopped inflating at different times, creating a multiverse. This isn't sci-fi. It's a mathematical consequence of our best models of how the Big Bang actually functioned. We might be one bubble in a cosmic sea of bubbles, each with different laws of physics.
The Cosmic Web and the Great Nothing
When you reach the absolute limit of zooming out, the universe stops looking like "things" and starts looking like a sponge. This is the Cosmic Web.
Dark matter—the invisible "glue" we can't see but can calculate—forms the scaffolding. Normal matter (the stuff that makes up you, me, and the stars) clings to these dark matter filaments. Between these filaments are Voids. These are massive expanses of literal nothingness, millions of light-years across, where there might only be one or two lonely galaxies.
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If you were in the middle of the Boötes Void, you might think you were the only thing in existence. You wouldn't see a single star in the sky with the naked eye.
What this means for us
It’s easy to feel small. Irrelevant, even. If the universe is this big, does a tax return or a broken heart really matter?
But there’s another way to look at it. You are a collection of atoms that came from the hearts of those dying stars you saw while zooming out. You are the universe's way of looking back at itself and asking, "How big am I?"
Carl Sagan used to say we are "star stuff." It's a bit cliché now, but it's physically true. The calcium in your teeth and the iron in your blood were forged in the supernovae of stars that lived and died billions of years before the Earth even existed.
How to actually explore this yourself
You don’t need a PhD to visualize this. There are real tools that let you experience this scale on your own screen:
- Space Engine: This is a 1-to-1 scale science-based universe simulator. You can literally fly from your backyard to the edge of the observable universe in seconds. It uses procedural generation based on real astronomical data.
- The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS): You can look at the actual maps scientists use to chart the cosmic web.
- WorldWide Telescope: A tool that turns your computer into a virtual observatory.
Actionable Insights for the Aspiring Space Enthusiast:
- Download "Scale of the Universe 2": It’s an old but gold interactive tool that lets you scroll from a neutrino all the way to the estimated size of the entire universe.
- Look for "Dark Sky" Parks: If you’ve only seen the sky from a city, you haven’t seen the Milky Way. Use the International Dark-Sky Association map to find a spot where the atmosphere is clear enough to see our galaxy's arm with your own eyes.
- Follow the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Feed: We are currently seeing "First Light" images—the furthest we have ever zoomed out into the past.
- Learn to identify the "Great Square of Pegasus": It’s a giant guidepost in the sky that helps you find the Andromeda Galaxy, the furthest thing you can see with the naked eye.
The more you learn about the scale of things, the more you realize that "zooming out" isn't just about distance. It's about time. To look far away is to look deep into the past. We aren't just looking at space; we are looking at history written in light.