35 Pictures That Will Make You Stop And Reevaluate Literally Every Single Decision You've Made In Life

If you've been on the internet the last few days, you've probably seen this image. It's a brand new picture of a tiny, tiny part of the observable universe, equal to a "grain of sand held at arm's length." Each one of those tiny little things is its own GALAXY.

infrared image of the universe

There are THOUSANDS of galaxies in this picture. THOUSANDS in that "tiny grain of sand."

Space Telescope Science Institut / NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

1.But let's back up for a second. This is the Earth! This is where we live.

The Earth

2.And this is where you live in your neighborhood, the solar system!

The solar system
NASA's The Space Place

3.Here's the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the moon. Doesn't look too far, does it?

The Earth and the moon

4. THINK AGAIN. Inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, nice and neatly.

5.But let's talk about planets. That little green smudge is North America on Jupiter.

Image showing the size of North America in comparison to Jupiter

6.And here's the size of Earth (well, six Earths) compared with Saturn:

Comparing the size of Earth to Saturn

7.While I have you here, this is how many Earths can fit across the diameter of Jupiter:

  NASA/SDO/Goddard/Tdadamemd
NASA/SDO/Goddard/Tdadamemd

8.And just for good measure, remember lovable little Pluto? We know what it looks like now!

  NASA via Getty Images
NASA via Getty Images

9.We even have images of Pluto's surface:

Pluto's surface

Wild.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

10. But that's nothing compared to our sun. Just remember, you live on one of those BARELY visible dots to the right of the sun:

11. And you see that little black dot next to the sun? That's Mercury:

12.But let's talk about Earth. Here's Earth from the moon:

View of Earth from the moon
NASA

13.Here's Earth from Mars:

  NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU

14.Here's Mars from Earth:

  Bill Dunford / Via solarsystem.nasa.gov

15.Here's Earth from just behind Saturn's rings:

  NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

16.And here's Earth from just beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles away.

To paraphrase the big man Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have ever known exists on that little speck.

To paraphrase the big man Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have ever known exists on that little speck.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

17.Let's step back a bit. Here's the size of Earth compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying, right?

The sun doesn't even fit in the image.

18.Here's that same sun from the surface of Mars:

  NASA/JPL-Caltech/Texas A&M/Cornell
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Texas A&M/Cornell

19. And here's the size of a black hole compared to our solar system:

20.But that's nothing. Again, as Carl once mused, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth:

Sand
Getty Images

21. Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than our little puny sun. Just look at how tiny and insignificant our sun is compared to VY Canis Majoris, one of the biggest stars we know of:

Our sun probably gets its lunch money stolen.

22.Here's another look. The biggest star we have observed, VY Canis Majoris, is 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun:

23.But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact, if you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:

  Getty Images
Getty Images

24.That's because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:

Our solar system in the Milky Way galaxy
NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt

By the way, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across:

Span of the Milky Way
NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt

25.But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. Here's the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light-years away from Earth:

Milky Way in comparison to other galaxies

26.But let's think bigger. Here's another picture with thousands and thousands of galaxies in it. This picture, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, contains millions of stars, each with their own planets.

Photo of many galaxies

27.Here's one of the galaxies pictured, UDF 423. This galaxy is 10 BILLION light-years away. When you look at this picture, you are looking billions of years into the past.

UDF 423 galaxy

28.And just keep this in mind — that's a picture of a very small, small part of the universe. It's just an insignificant fraction of the night sky.

photo of the universe

This is just for demonstration purposes, not an actual shot zoomed in.

Getty

So just remember...

This is your home.

The Earth

29.This is what happens when you zoom out from your home to your solar system.

The solar system

30.And this is what happens when you zoom out farther...

Zoomed out photo of the solar system

31.And farther...

The Milky Way galaxy

32.Keep going...

Zoomed out photo of the Milky Way galaxy

33.Just a little bit farther...

  Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via jpl.nasa.gov

34.Almost there...

Virgo supercluster

35.And here it is. Here's everything in the observable universe, and here's your place in it. Just a tiny little ant in a giant jar.

The observable universe
  Universalimagesgroup / Getty Images
Universalimagesgroup / Getty Images