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27 Pictures That Will Make You Reevaluate Your Entire Existence

Existential crisis in 3...2...1...

1. This is the Earth! This is where you live.

Earth viewed from space, showing continents and clouds

2. And this is where you live in your neighborhood, the solar system.

3. Here's the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the moon. Doesn't look too far, does it?

Earth and Moon seen from space with vast darkness around them

4. THINK AGAIN. Inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, nice and neatly.

Graphic showing planets to scale with text indicating the average Earth-Moon distance with space remaining

5. But let's talk about planets. That little green smudge is North America on Jupiter.

Illustration showing North America's size contrasted with Jupiter and the Great Red Spot

6. And here's the size of Earth (well, six Earths) compared with Saturn:

Saturn and its rings with Earth, Venus, and Mars aligned for a cosmic portrait

7. And just for good measure, remember lovable little Pluto? We know what it looks like now!

8. This right here is a comet. We landed a probe on one of those bad boys not too long ago. Here's what one looks like compared with Paris:

Comparison of a comet to Paris

9. But that's nothing compared to our sun. Just remember:

10. While we're at it, here's you from the moon:

Lunar module ascends from moon's surface with Earth in the background

11. Here's you from Mars:

Pale Blue Dot photo of Earth taken from Voyager 1, with Earth as a tiny speck in vast darkness

12. Here's you from just behind Saturn's rings:

Pale Blue Dot image by Voyager 1, Earth seen as a tiny dot amidst vast space

13. And here's you from just beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles away.

Night sky with a faint trail possibly from an aircraft

14. Let's step back a bit. Here's the size of Earth compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying, right?

The image shows the sun with solar flares and a small Earth inset for size comparison

15. Here's that same sun from the surface of Mars:

Sunset captured by a rover on the Martian horizon with dusty sky

16. But that's nothing. Again, as Carl once mused, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth:

Sand

17. But let's talk about the size of a galaxy. If you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:

Illustration of a simplified United States map without state labels

18. That's because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:

Our solar system in the Milky Way galaxy

19. By the way, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across:

Span of the Milky Way

20. That's because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:

21. But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. Here's the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth:

22. But let's think bigger. Here's another picture with thousands and thousands of galaxies in it. This picture, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, contains millions of stars, each with their own planets.

Photo of many galaxies

23. Here's one of the galaxies pictured, UDF 423. This galaxy is 10 BILLION light-years away. When you look at this picture, you are looking billions of years into the past.

UDF 423 galaxy

24. And just keep this in mind — that's a picture of a very small, small part of the universe. It's just an insignificant fraction of the night sky.

photo of the universe

So if you're ever feeling upset about your favorite show being canceled or the fact that they play Christmas music way too early — just remember...

25. This is your home.

The Earth

26. This is what happens when you zoom out from your home to your solar system.

27. And this is what happens when you zoom out farther...

And farther...

Keep going...

Just a little bit farther...

Almost there...

And here it is. Here's everything in the observable universe, and here's your place in it. Just a tiny little ant in a giant jar.