Occasionally the immensity of the universe is laid bare in a single statistic. There are between 200 and 300 billion stars in our galaxy. You could name a star in our galaxy for every person on the earth and you’d still leave 97% of our galaxy unnamed.
Now do we know the exact number of stars in the galaxy? No, and for two primary reasons…
- Not all can be seen from our position in the galaxy
- And frankly, if you were to dedicate your entire life — night and day without break — to counting the stars in our galaxy, you would never even cross the one percentile threshold.
Such a simple task would require not 100 years but 100 lifetimes. Consider the simple math: The average human lifespan takes place over a span of 80 years, give or take. Okay, 80 years breaks down to exactly two-and-a-half billion seconds. If you were to count all the stars in our galaxy — one second at a time — you would be counting for nearly 8000 years, nonstop. One second = one star; 250 billion seconds = 8000 years. Counting the stars in our galaxy would be a commitment of nearly 100 lifetimes. Really, perhaps 200 if you took the opportunity to sleep or eat. That’s one very sore neck. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about visiting any of these stars… no; just sitting on a lawn chair, it would be the One Hundred and First Century (say, around year 10,016) before you finished simply counting them.
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