putting things into perspective

 American journalist Harry Golden once wrote:

"I have a rule against registering complaints in a restaurant; because I know that there are at least four billion suns in the Milky Way – which is only one galaxy. Many of these suns are thousands of times larger than our own, and vast millions of them have whole planetary systems, including literally billions of satellites, and all of this revolves at the rate of about a million miles an hour, like a huge oval pinwheel. 

Our own sun and its planets, which includes the earth, are on the edge of this wheel. This is only our small corner of the universe, so why do not these billions of revolving and rotating suns and planets collide? The answer is, the space is so unbelievably vast that if we reduced the suns and the planets in correct mathematical proportion with relation to the distances between them, each sun would be a speck of dust, two, three and four thousand miles away from its nearest neighbour. 

And, mind you, this is only the Milky Way – our own small comer – our own galaxy. How many galaxies are there? Billions. Billions of galaxies spaced at about one million light‑years apart (one light‑year is about six trillion miles). Within the range of our biggest telescopes there are at least one hundred million separate galaxies such as our own Milky Way, and that is not all, by any means. The scientists have found that the further you go out into space with the telescopes the thicker the galaxies become, and there are billions of billions as yet uncovered to the scientist's camera and astrophysicist's calculations."

When you think of all this, it's silly to worry whether the waitress brought you string beans instead of limas. 

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