You are 1 of the 8,232,000,000 people (i.e. 8.2 billion, in 2025, (ref. 1)) making up 0.01% of the biomass on Earth (ref. 2), and standing (or sitting) in just 0.00015 square km of the total surface area of 510 million square km (196,900,000 square miles) of the planet (ref. 3), which is revolving at 1,670 km/h (1,037.5 mph) (ref. 4). You're 384,633 kilometres (239,000 miles) from the moon (ref. 5), and 149.6 million kilometres (92.92 million miles – 1 astronomical unit) from the Sun (ref. 6), which you're moving around at 107,000 km/h (67,000 mph) (ref. 4). You're 40.2 trillion kilometres away (24.9 trillion miles) (ref. 7) from the nearest other star to our Sun (Proxima Centauri). You're in the Milky Way galaxy, which contains 100-400 billion stars (ref. 8), is approximately 946,000 trillion kilometres (11,547,562 trillion miles) across (ref. 9), and is moving at the phenomenal speed of 630 km/s (1,400,000 mph) within the currently observable universe (ref. 10), which is approximately 864,156 billion trillion kilometres (536,962 billion trillion miles) in diameter (ref. 11).
And you're here for just a moment:
Humans as we know them today (Homo sapiens) have existed for only 300,000 years of the Earth's approximately 4.5 billion year history (ref. 12), or the approximately 13.7 billion years of the history of the universe (ref. 13), To put that in context, stretch your arms out to the sides and imagine that the time the Earth has existed is the distance from the tips of your fingers on your left hand, across your shoulders, and out to the tips of the fingers of your right hand. If you were to clip the fingernails on your right hand, you'd pretty-much wipe-out all of human history. Even if you were to reach the grand age of 100 years old, you would still only been around for 0.03% of the time since the first humans, 0.000002% of the Earth's history, and 0.00000076% of the time since the beginning of the universe.
Of course Monty Python said it better than we ever can (in a song). You might like to watch their video on YouTube.
So... how big do your problems seem now? Maybe it’s not so bad to be lost after all.
References:
- Figure 0: https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/charting-the-milky-way-from-the-inside-out
- 1: https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population/WORLD
- 2: https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth
- 3: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/if-everyone-stood-together-in-the-same-place-what-area-would-we-cover
- 4: https://www.space.com/33527-how-fast-is-earth-moving.html
- 5: https://www.nasa.gov/moon
- 6: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/
- 7: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html
- 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
- 9: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-disc-milky-bigger-thought.html
- 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Velocity
- 11: https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/astrophysics/how-big-is-space-we-asked-a-nasa-expert-episode-61/
- 12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth
- 13: https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_life.html