George Carlin used to joke that humans are conceited fools regarding recycling and the Save the Planet movement. Here we are, on a little ball, floating around the sun for nearly 14 billion years, and we think the planet will be saved by recycling some plastic. The planet will be fine, he assures us. We’re fucked, but the planet will be fine.

For over 2.5 million years, when pondering our existence and asking the question, “What did we come from?” Man has looked skyward for answers. Surely, someone or some thing had to have created this. It’s a legitimate question. Could it be that we’re not much closer to an answer today than we were during the Stone Age?

Even with the sophistication of our modern scientific tools, the universe is still considered so vast that it stretches beyond the limits of human comprehension. Let’s start with the speed of light, which measures distances to everything else far away. The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second or roughly 671 million miles per hour. I can maybe start to visualize 671 mph, but not 671,000 mph, and certainly not 671,000,000 mph. For starters, that’s so fast it seems instant, and, from the human perspective, it is.

A light-year is approximately 5.879 trillion miles. Our Sun is 93 million miles away from Earth. Earth’s circumference is 24,901 miles. You would have to circumnavigate the globe 3,735 times to simulate traveling the distance from Earth to the Sun. Light (at 186,282 mps) takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to get from the Sun to Earth. Those rays that are tanning your backside — they left the Sun over 8 minutes ago.

Now try to wrap your head around some of these numbers

• Pluto, the farthest planet from the Earth in our solar system, is 3.3 billion miles from Earth (0.003561 light-years).

• Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us, is 4.37 light-years away.

• The Milky Way Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years in diameter. So, if you were to travel at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), it would take you 100,000 years to cross from one side of the Milky Way to the other. (587,900,000,000,000,000,000 miles).

• The Andromeda Galaxy is ~2.5 million light=years away (14,700,000,000,000,000,000 miles)

• The observable universe — the portion of the universe that we can see — is estimated to be about 93 billion light years in diameter (546,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles). This doesn’t mean that the universe is only 93 billion light-years across; it’s simply the part we can observe given the finite speed of light and the universe’s age (about 13.8 billion years).

• There are thought to be roughly 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and 200 billion trillion stars (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).

For all we know, the universe could be infinite. To George Carlin’s point, yes, we are an arrogant, conceited bunch of fools to think that the world revolves around us and that we have the slightest impact on anything in the big picture. Homo Sapiens have been in existence for only 5 million years. That’s a small fraction of the time we think we know about (~0.036% of the Earth’s 13.8 billion years), and we only developed the knowledge to discover that the Earth wasn’t flat a little over 500 years ago. A little perspective, please.

Sometimes, I think it would be helpful to have a map of the universe with a “==> You Are Here” arrow to show how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. Some of us think our brains are so advanced, our knowledge so deep, that we have all the answers, but a wise philosopher said it best 2,500 years ago.

“The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.”

— Socrates