Where do you live?

British spelling

Imagine you were asked that question about where you live, your answer might be to say the name of your street or road, the number or name of your house, then you could mention the name of your village, town or city.

You could go further and say what country you are from. There are 195 countries spread out around the globe. Your answer would probably end there.

You and 8 billion other people live out their lives on a massive rock which we call the Earth, our home planet takes a year to make a complete orbit of the Sun. To achieve that journey the Earth is racing through space at 107,000 kilometres per hour.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

We also live inside the solar system which consists of our local star the Sun, eight planets, well over 200 moons and countless other celestial objects. The solar system is also in orbit around the centre of our galaxy.

The time it takes for the solar system to make one revolution around the centre of our galaxy is roughly 230 million years, now that's an epic journey. The solar system has made that galactic journey an estimated 20 times since its creation.

The Sun is estimated to be around 4.6 billion years old but we could say that the Sun is 20 galactic years old, which sounds much younger.

So, explaining where we live, we can go further still and say we live in a galaxy, our home galaxy is a massive structure of stars called the Milky Way. Our galaxy with you onboard is moving through space at the incredible speed of 2.1 million kilometres per hour. Yes, it is mind-boggling.

To top it off, we can also say, we live in a gargantuan area called the Universe. That place is estimated to have a diameter of over 93 billion light-years at this time, but it keeps getting bigger as it continues to expand.

93 billion light-years, what does that mean? It is the time light would take to travel the whole diameter of the known Universe. The speed of light is almost 300,000 kilometres per second, yes per second. For every hour of that 93 billion years light will travel 1,080 million kilometres, yes, its size is beyond our comprehension.

Some Scientists think that there could be countless Universes out there in the unknown, But that is just speculation, we will probably never know if that is true.

Personally, not getting all the answers to the important questions we ask becomes frustrating. Why is there a Universe? Why do we and other life forms exist?

Maybe someday, we will find out for sure that we are not alone in the Universe.

End of article.

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We can only imagine what our early ancestors were thinking as they gazed up at the night sky, were they curious as to what the heavens had to hide?

Now it is very different as we have developed sophisticated telescopes and other specialised scientific instruments that are helping to reveal some of the secrets that the Universe holds.

Simple life forms were living on our planet well over 3.5 billion years ago, since that time billions of animal species have existed, and millions of species are still alive today.

The evolutionary path for life has been long but at last, we have finally arrived. Our highly developed brain has given us intelligence and curiosity, now we can try and make sense of our existence.

You might find my 16-part story interesting and educational. Please, come and join me.

Free to read.

Part 1. Our Space Journey. Enjoy.