So how big is the universe anyways? A question that has baffled our brilliant brains for centuries, that’s how big it is. Now, imagine this if you will: the average walking speed of humans is 5km/h, so if you walk to work and it takes you 30min not counting accidents, thefts, or stop lights, you would have walked 2.5km to work. Now, try walking for about 5,913,000,000km. Pretty big walk, eh? If you do the math, you’d be walking for about 1,182,600,000 hours, which also translates to 135,000 years, so even if you could live that long, you’d be very old, weak, tired, and in desperate need of a restroom.

Now, that is just a simple representation of how big our solar system’s radius is from the Sun to Pluto. If you want something else to do while wasting your time, open up your paint program, zoom in as far as you can, and make the smallest dot you possible can. I’ll give a minute to work on this one… We done? Good, now let’s have look. Zoom out so you can see the whole canvas, and compare the dot of whatever colour you chose to everything else. It’s pretty small, don’t you think? That is an appropriate representation of our solar system to the rest of the galaxy, so, probably needing about 1000 dots or so bumps your years walking spent up to 135,000,000 now.

To see how fast you could traverse the distance, let’s take our original number of 5,913,000,000 and put our speed at 40,234km/h (the speed required to break Earth’s gravity). That’s still only 146,965 hours, so you would be travelling for about 16-17 years, so it is possible, but being trapped with boring literature and freecell doesn’t seem the best holiday vacation either. And, as for the fact of how big our universe is, nobody knows, and nobody will know for many millenia to come.

But I can tell you this: the simple reason we can’t say the size of the universe isn’t because of the fact that we don’t know how many galaxies are out there, but because we don’t know how much space there is between them. And, in my opinion, the universe is pretty much defining our existence in entirety, so being able to say how big it is would mean that if we cross a certain point, we no longer exist, and that wouldn’t really feel good, now would it? And why am I telling you this? Well, if I have to ask this, then ask yourself, ‘Why did I read this?’