There was a time not so long ago, when humans believed the Earth was the center of the universe. Since then, humanity has made strides to understand what we are, where we are, and how we came to be. We have a pretty good idea about all of that, now, thanks to the great minds of dozens of generations before us. However, have we been wrong all along; has Earth been in the center of the universe this whole time?
In order to understand this we must first understand where we are within the universe. We are located on Earth, well one of the Earth's within the universe anyway (We did an awful job naming our Planet). The Earth travels around our Sun along with everything else within its gravitational pull. Everything under the sun (pun intended) comprises the solar system. From the solar system we have Orion's Arm, the part of the Milky Way that we orbit its center on. Then we have the Milky Way Galaxy, comprised of around 300 million star systems.
This is where everything gets interesting. From the Milky Way Galaxy our closest neighbor is trying to eat us. Literally, the Andromeda Galaxy will eat us; luckily, this threat is much like global warming -- no one really cares because we will be long gone by the time it can destroy us. The Milky Way and Andromeda are two of multiple galaxies which cluster around each other, this is called the local cluster. There are over 40 galaxies either smaller or larger than our own within this local group. Next, we have the Virgo super-cluster which is massive. To put this into perspective; there are over 100 clusters within this super-cluster (Hence, the term "Super.") This is a massive grouping of clusters all floating around aimlessly in one general direction; lovely, isn't it?
From here we get really basic (not coffee shop basic, though -- not yet, anyway). From the Virgo super-cluster we have the observable universe. In this observable universe there is hundreds of millions of galaxies within millions of super-clusters. The incredible part about the observable universe is that there is still more out there; we are limited to what we can see. The farthest we can go currently is 13 billion years. We can only observe the light that has reached us. This means that a majority of what we see in the farthest reaches of the universe, is the dying light of millions of long dead star systems and galaxies.
Now that we see how insignificant we are, let's build up our ego a little. We are in the center of the universe. Well, not really, but we are in the center of the observable universe. For all we know we could be at the very edge of the real universe, if there even is an edge. Heck we can even be a speck of dust floating within one bubble in a labyrinth of other bubbles, each containing its own universe. Sadly no matter how hard I try I can't seem to bring some significance to your last Instagram post.
