#1-How Big IS This Place?

It’s easy enough to say: there are about 100 billion stars in an average galaxy and two trillions galaxies in the universe. It’s comprehending what that means that’s hard. It goes right over our heads. In some ways we are just like the old Eskimos that counted 1, 2, 3, many. Numbers that large are just ‘many’.

So let’s try and get a grip on these figures. Take a teaspoon. Not a tablespoon, but a lowly teaspoon. Scoop up some salt and level it off. Now spread that teaspoon of salt out on a table top. Group the salt grains together in piles of ten, and count the piles. It’ll help to arrange the piles into a row of 10. Now make 10 rows. That’s a hundred piles, a thousand grains. You’ll have to do that 5 times before you’re done with the teaspoon of salt – 500 piles in all, or 5,000 grains. That would be about the number of stars we can see with our naked eye on a good night.

But obviously there is more than that in the entire Milky Way. So to go on with our visualization: use your teaspoon to fill a quart or liter bottle with salt. It’d be way, way faster than counting them up (that would take about a month). That’s one million ‘stars’.

Now take that quart and use it to fill up four bath tubs. It’s going to take you a while. That’s a billion grains of salt. There’s about 100 billion stars in an average galaxy (although ours is about 300 billion – but let’s stick to the average galaxy). That’s a lot of bathtubs. In fact, it’s enough to fill my rather average living room and dining room, to the ceiling. That’s a lot of salt grains. That’s a lot of stars in one galaxy.

There’s about 57,000,000 square miles of dry land on earth. If you cover it all with 4 feet of salt, you’ve got the stars in 2 trillion galaxies.

Mind boggling, isn’t it?

And how long has all this been going on?