A Flight Through the Universe, by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Apologies if already posted, please delete as necessary. Found this fascinating and it kind of puts a lot of things in context, the earth as beautiful as it is, is really insignificant

This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 -- roughly 7 billion light years distant -- and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond. All credit goes to Sloan Digital Sky Survey, uploaded by BerkleeLab

There's billions of reasons why more advanced types of life are probably out there.

to think that most of those galaxies that are billions of light years away, must have either fused with other galaxies or have been obliterated by now.

given those numbers the chances that some other being is looking at a similar video and having the same thoughts, are very likely.

next time you look up at the stars and think "is there anyone out there?" just know that someone light years away is thinking the exact same thing at the exact same time.

Originally posted by k1k1to
...next time you look up at the stars and think "is there anyone out there?" just know that someone light years away is thinking the exact same thing at the exact same time.

It boggles my mind sometimes to think about some intelligent ET out there, somewhere, and putting myself in their position -- going about its day, walking(?) around on its planet, just doing its thing.

The Milky Way has a potential 17 billion earth like planets:

news.sky.com...

Suddenly I feel even more insignificant

The Universe is very awe-inspiring. And it shows just how insignificant we are compared to the Universe. We're pretty much cosmic dust in the vastness of our Universe. And, I also think about ET intelligence quite a bit. If one specie is 10x more intelligent than us, what would that mean? What would they be like? Another thing that I think about is, what is beyond our Universe? More Universes? Maybe we're just living inside one big simulator.

This is just incredible! Amazing!