Planet Earth. You are here 🌍

Being human is a truly mind-blowing experience. How often do we stop and marvel at how unusual and wild the experience of being alive is? The only natural reaction to existence should be utter awe—yet we so easily get lost in our day-to-day thoughts and trivial concerns. How is it that we overlook the sheer wonder of this experience so effortlessly?

If Earth is the stage we act upon, then what does that make the cosmos?

Consciousness is a strange thing—you know that you know. I sometimes wonder, within the vastness of the universe, if there are things so beyond our comprehension that we could never even imagine them as real.

Consider this: within just our medium-sized galaxy, there are approximately 300 million habitable planets. These are planets that are roughly Earth-sized, orbiting their stars within a habitable zone—neither too close 🥵, nor too far 🥶.

Yet, these make up only 0.1% to 0.3% of all the planets within our humble Milky Way. Imagine all the other types of planets that could exist!

Take Saturn, for example—our beautiful ringed giant 🪐. Its diameter is 9.5 times that of Earth’s. A cross-section of its rings spans a distance equivalent to four Earths placed side by side, yet their thickness is merely 1 kilometer—a short walking distance. The rings are composed of space debris, ranging from fine dust, like grains of sand, to chunks as massive as Mount Everest.

And Saturn is just a single, insignificant gas giant drifting within our modest little solar system, which itself stretches 7.5 billion kilometers from the Sun to the Kuiper Belt—a distant region of icy debris home to dwarf planets like (former real planet) Pluto, Makemake, and Eris.

So how could the larger cosmos not host phenomena beyond even our wildest dreams? Yet it’s real. It’s out there. It’s happening in this very moment, just as surely as you are reading these words right now.

What stories lie beyond the cosmic horizon? Here we are—on this tiny blue marble, floating in an infinite dark abyss. Walking around, talking to one another, worrying about the future, regretting the past. Nothing more than monkeys with tools.

And if you stop to think about it for even two seconds—it’s absolutely mind-blowing.