How Big is the Whole Universe

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Right now, you're hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour.

[00:00:05]You can't feel it, you can't stop it, and compared to what I'm about to show you, you are nothing.

[00:00:13]Let's go!

[00:00:17]Start with the moon. Seems close, right?

[00:00:20]384,000 kilometers away. Drive a car there. Non-stop, no sleep.

[00:00:27]You arrive in 160 days. That's just the moon.

[00:00:31]Our nearest neighbor, we're just getting warmed up.

[00:00:34]The sun, 150 million kilometers out. Light. The fastest thing in existence takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to get here.

[00:00:43]And the sun is just our star. One of 400 billion in this galaxy alone.

[00:00:49]Mars! Our closest planetary neighbor, the one we're desperately trying to reach, at its nearest, 54 million kilometers. At its farthest, 401 million, Jet Speed to Mars.

[00:01:04]50 plus years, we've sent robots. It takes 24 minutes just for our signal to reach them.

[00:01:11]By the time you say, turn left. They've already crashed.

[00:01:16]Now, let's go to the edge. Neptune.

[00:01:20]4.5 billion kilometers away. Sunlight takes four hours and fifteen minutes to reach it.

[00:01:28]Four hours.

[00:01:31]For light, here's something haunting. Voyager 1 launched in the 1,977.

[00:01:39]It has been flying through space for over 40 years.

[00:01:43]It's now 22 billion kilometers from Earth.

[00:01:47]And it hasn't even left our cosmic neighborhood yet. In 1990, we pointed Voyager's camera back at Earth from six billion kilometers away.

[00:01:56]Here's what we got. That pale, barely visible speck. That's us.

[00:02:02]Every war. Every love story. Every person who ever lived. A moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[00:02:10]Carl Sagan said that. And he wasn't wrong. Past the Orte Cloud.

[00:02:15]A shell of icy debris stretching 1.9 light years out. We finally leave the sun's grip.

[00:02:21]And now, we're in between the stars. This is where the real numbers start to hurt.

[00:02:27]The closest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.4 light years away.

[00:02:33]Voyager 1. Flying at 17 kilometers per second.

[00:02:38]Would take 70,000 years to get there. We haven't sent anything that could make that trip.

[00:02:44]We don't know if we ever will.

[00:02:47]Zoom out. Way out. Our galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.

[00:02:54]Hundreds of billions of stars. Each one potentially with planets.

[00:02:58]Now here's the part that should keep you up at night. Every TV show.

[00:03:03]Every radio signal. Every broadcast humanity has ever sent into space.

[00:03:08]It's reached a bubble about 100 light years wide. 100 light years.

[00:03:13]In a galaxy that's 100,000 light years across. We've whispered into one tiny corner.

[00:03:19]The rest of the galaxy has no idea we exist.

[00:03:22]Keep zooming. Our galaxy is part of a cluster called the local group.

[00:03:28]50 plus galaxies. Spanning 10 million light years.

[00:03:33]10 million. Then there's the Virgo Super Cluster.

[00:03:37]110 million light years wide. Thousands of galaxies.

[00:03:43]Then that is swallowed by something called Lawnia Kea.

[00:03:47]Half a billion light years across. With the mass of 100 quads, really in suns.

[00:03:53]And at its center. Something called the Great Attractor.

[00:03:58]A gravitational force so massive. It's pulling our entire galaxy toward it.

[00:04:05]We don't fully understand it. We can't see it. But we're falling toward it right now.

[00:04:13]And then finally, the observable universe.

[00:04:17]93 billion light years across.

[00:04:21]Wait. If the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, how is it 93 billion light years wide?

[00:04:32]Because space itself is expanding faster than light in some places.

[00:04:39]Which means there are galaxies we will never see.

[00:04:44]Not because they're too far. But because the space between us and them is stretching faster than their light can cross it.

[00:04:53]They are gone. Forever. From our perspective, they don't exist.

[00:04:59]So, how big is the universe bigger than we can see, bigger than we can measure, possibly infinite?

[00:05:07]You woke up this morning on a rock. Or bidding a star in a galaxy.

[00:05:11]In a super cluster. In an observable universe that might be a rounding error in something far larger.

[00:05:18]And somehow, against all of those odds, you exist.

[00:05:23]That's either the most terrifying thing you've ever heard. Or the most beautiful. Maybe both.