Astronomical Scale Quotes

The universe is very large, and its boundaries are not known very well, but it is still possible to define some kind of a radius to be associated with it.

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day.

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

The mystery of the universe is not time but size.

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

When the camera is looking back at our planet Earth, it's the tiniest of specks somewhere out there in the universe. So we do have a new sense of proportion. Of course the volcanoes and the magma under us just remind us of that.

The Earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides, is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.

Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless

Yes I do it big, call me little astronomical. Weezy F. Baby and the F is for phenomenal.

I try to keep this in mind when tied in to a rope 75 feet up in a tree... The history of ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of let-downs for those who like to believe we are special.

The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.

Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.

The principal reason for the universe's poker face is that its constituents are far away. Stars careen through space, and galaxies spin at speeds thousands of times faster than a jet plane. But given their distance, you'd need the patience of Job to notice much change in their appearance or position.

I like to think that we’re revolving on this planet and revolving through the galaxy. I love having context that’s so much bigger than I can fathom. It’s fantastic to realise how insignificant you are.

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale

A million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.

I've been enthralled by deep vistas of space and time ever since watching George Pal's film of 'The Time Machine,' while an early encounter with Arthur C. Clarke's 'The City And The Stars' cemented my love for books with a scope spanning millions of years.