We almost all stopped looking up at the skies and instead are now looking down at our little phone screens.
Somewhere along the way, the infinite got traded for the immediate.
Some things to wonder about:
Did you know that our Sun has been fusing 600 million tons of hydrogen every second for more than 4.5 billion years — and will keep doing so for another 4 billion?
Try to imagine 600.000.000 tons of hydrogen every second!
Did you know that our closest galactic neighbour is the Andromeda Galaxy?
And that Andromeda is about 2.5 million light-years away from us?
Which means the light we see from it today left 2.5 million years ago — long before modern humans even existed.
Even the light from our own Sun takes a little over 8 minutes to reach us.
If the Sun were to stop shining right now, we wouldn’t notice it for about 8 minutes.
Ever wondered how many stars there are in our own Milky Way?
Somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars!
And now imagine there are about 2 trillion galaxies out there —
that’s roughly 2,000,000,000,000 universes of stars.
Did you know that our planet isn’t the only one with volcanoes?
Venus has them too — and to make it even more interesting, some moons have volcanoes as well!
Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, is covered in active lava plumes,
Enceladus, orbiting Saturn, has icy cryovolcanoes that shoot water into space —
and there may be even more out there waiting to be discovered.
And there is so much more to be discovered!
Please put your phone away and start wondering what’s out there.
A wondering Brain out.