Want to get a better sense of how Earth fits into the universe? Let’s take a trip. Imagine you can fly straight up.
After about four miles, you can’t breathe anymore. Flip on the oxygen, and keep going. Look, there’s the Moon, which helps control our tides. Go farther and you reach the Sun. That’s our planet’s energy source. Go even farther, and you can see that our Sun is just one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. But even the Milky Way is tiny. It’s like a grain of sand, and the universe is like a beach.