Two galaxies collide! Earth is doomed!... oh, never mind.

That's the Andromeda Galaxy (left) colliding with us, The Milky Way galaxy (right)

This is a Hubble Space telescope depiction of our Milky Way galaxy--with some 300 billion stars--colliding with the 1 trillion star Andromeda Galaxy (galaxies not shown actual size) in just 4.5 years... er, I mean 4.5 BILLION years, moving towards each other at 68 miles per second!  So let this be a warning to all of us... WATCH OUT!

Yes, this will actually happen. But aside from the almost unbelievable numbers of stars and space, here's an even more incredible fact: As the 1 trillion-star galaxy passes through our 300 billion-star galaxy, the long odds are that not one star will even come close to a collision with any other. 

Space is so vast that if our sun was the size of a ping pong ball, the nearest solar object would be the size of a pea 689 miles distant. The pass-through speed of the galaxies would be a not too shabby 100 billion miles-per-hour.

In our observable universe, cosmologists are certain there are at least 2 trillion universes consisting of trillions and trillions of stars and our universe is expanding at an enormous rate beyond any known number. 

So how did all this happen. Was it always there, limitless and growing?  And who are we in the grand scheme? 

Our Milky Way galaxy is only average in size compared to the trillions of others. And we think WE are the intelligent life in our universe. What nerve!

This is an actual photo of our Earth and Moon, taken by a satellite we launched, from a mere 71 million miles away. NO, NOT THE BIG WHITE ROUND THING IN THE UPPER RIGHT CORNER, and not even that little teensy dot near the lower left... but the even tinier dot almost lost near the tiny dot, if you can see it. That's us. The bigger tiny dot (oxymoron alert) is our sun!

And if you want to read how really small we are in fiction, take a look at this Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss. It helps put things in perspective.

Will we ever learn that we control nothing but ourselves and often, not even that.