There are approx. 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Now look at this galaxy. It has 200 to 300 billion stars. Now….there are billions of galaxies! With billions of stars and that is just what we can observe with the current technology. A billion billion is a Quintillion and there is about 400 billion x a quintillion stars in the known universe. Something to the power of 10 to the 24th. It blows my mind. What gets me isn't just the number of stars, and the enormous scale and size and distance. It's the amount of time. That each galaxy is 31 million light years away. The amount of time it took for the light from that picture to reach us, entire species could evolve on planets and develop into a space faring galactic civilization; empires could rise and fall, then fade into dust, and be lost in the sands of time, without us ever knowing. And that's just the 31 million years it took for that light, which is a drop in the bucket of time that this galaxy has had to create life over many many billions of years.
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