I’ve been following the TV series Star Trek Voyager for a while now, downloading episodes and watching them on my computer. Star Trek Voyager is a story about a lone earth starship that gets stranded in the “Delta Quadrant”, the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy, some 70.000 light years from home. And during the seven seasons the show was running, it mostly consisted of “getting home”.

Of course, this is a TV series, so they have access to technology few of us would consider likely today: warp drives, slipstream drives and so on… And a few random wormholes here and there. But at the start of the journey home, it was predicted to take 70 years. And that’s traveling at the speed of a 1000 light years per year, one thousand times faster than light itself.

Space is huge. If we look to the parameters of our own solar system, the Apollo missions were the farthest we’ve traveled today. Any mission to Mars, our closest neighbor, will take roughly six months to complete – one way. And beyond Mars is Jupiter at about five times the distance away, then Saturn… and so on. Our closest neighbor star is four light-years away…. At today’s technology it might take thousands of years to go there.

The journey across the galaxy, then, seems a bit longer. Following the TV series through season after season gives a little indication of the size of it. The Milky Way is over 100.000 light-years across, and is thought to house between 200 to 400 billion stars. One can easily sympathize with Voyager’s relentless crew.

But what is beyond that? Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a tiny part of the universe. We’re part of a little galaxy group neatly dubbed “the Local Group”, some 50-odd galaxies that make up our little part of the Virgo Supercluster, which itself contains some 100 clusters and groups of galaxies. And this supercluster makes up the structure of the Universe, which contains many, many more superclusters with enormous voids in between them. The entire universe is thought to hold some 80 billion … galaxies (not stars, galaxies).

If our galaxy were about the size of a soccer football, the Virgo Supercluster would be about the size of 20 soccer fields spread out in a ring around it. Ample space to kick our little galaxy football around. Our little solar system, the Sun and its planets, would itself be the size of roughly 10-20 atoms of oxygen inside the soccer ball.

And the universe itself? The observable part of the universe might be well over a million soccer fields to play on. And the universe beyond that, which we can only speculate about… might be infinitely larger.

It’s a big world.