The Milky-Way galaxy is mind-bogglingly big.
Eh," you say, "100,000 light years in diameter, give or take a few."
Listen, pal: just because you can measure something in light years doesn't mean you truly understand how big it really is.
By the time you carve our galaxy up into units you have actual, personal experience with, you'll have to start using numbers that you won't live long enough to count to.
That's okay. The galaxy doesn't care. In fact, not caring is one of the things it does best.
That, and being really, really, really big.
--Howard Taylor
Our PLANET is mind-numbingly big. If you don’t believe me go to the grand canyon and look down. Did I say go to the grand canyon? Make that HIKE to the grand canyon from yellowstone national park. Still not convinced? ROW across the ocean to china. Bonus points if you can hit Japan without a gps.
So in a twisted sort of sense, the milky-way galaxy is less mind-bogglingly big, because our [or at least my] built-in distance-comprehension hardware shorts out so quickly when attempting to deal with the milky way galaxy we don't really even notice it and so we switch to rigorous numbers which do not have this short-circuiting problem.
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: