This Animation Of Our Solar System Will Change Your Universe

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It's the kind of question that can keep you up at night: How big is space? 

"Space is big," Douglas Adams wrote inhis classic, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. "Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

No doubt most of us have lost some productivity staring out the window trying to comprehend the incomprehensible distances between the planets and to the stars beyond. But it's one thing to ponder the scale of life we live; it's another thing entirely to see how it all fits together. 

Humans live in an in-between space that feels just right at times. When you're trying to deal with an ant infestation, you can be happy you don't live on a smaller scale. When you have to cross the city and you can't catch a cab, you probably wish your legs were a lot longer. 

But when you contemplate the cosmos, longer legs don't mean much. From the ridiculously small – so small that humans can see it through a microscope with their own eyes – to the stars so incomprehensibly huge that we can see light they shed millions of years ago in the night sky, it's all a journey beyond our scope. 

Here's a great animation that gives you an idea of just how massive the universe is – and how we fit in.

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