Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

> The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.

In fact, technically, there's nothing here. It's all out there.

The Sun: 99.86% of the solar system's total mass.

Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass.

Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass.

Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass.

All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass.

Your brain mass is about 3 disposable water bottles in weight and we can debate what parts of that are thinking and actually "you".

You are insignificant on the scale of the solar system let alone the universe.

>Tragula's wife used to complain to him about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. She would often tell her husband to have some sense of proportion, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in one day. In response to her pleas for him to find some perspective, he built the Total Perspective Vortex.

>Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain...

~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe