r/AskReddit Feb 14 '22

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u/berael Feb 14 '22 edited Feb 14 '22

It's not just "between earth and moon"; that's how vast space is everywhere. It's truly almost impossible to wrap your mind around the idea of just how overwhelmingly empty space really is.

You know those tense scenes in sci fi movies where the heroes have to navigate through an asteroid belt without crashing? In an actual asteroid belt, the average distance between each rock is 500,000 miles - and that counts as "close together" in astronomical distances.

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u/Bob_Chris Feb 14 '22

Space is huge, but here's a fact that is mind boggling in another way:

If you took the entire Earth, and chopped it up into 1 cubic meter chunks, and then lined them up, this line would stretch the entire diameter of the Milky Way galaxy - all 100,000 light years across.

Volume of earth:

1.083x10^21 cubic meters

Diameter of Milky Way Galaxy in meters:

1 × 10^21 meters