The most epic thing about space is how it misled me about it's enormity

The most epic thing about space is how it misled me about it's enormity<br><br>I was going to school, when I was fourth grade, and I thought about the universe. My mind wandered for a moment, and I thought about how cool it would be if the universe was so big that if we went space, we could not even be able to see over the horizon of the universe. I thought that it would so cool to actually genuinely navigate the universe, and be like, "I need to get to Mars. I need to go to the Moon over there. I need to find where a black hole is." <br><br>I started to calculate it out when I got home, after school. I was fourth grade, so my math skills were really bad. I didn't know how to calculate the circumference of the Earth. I didn't know what was the ratio of planets to distance over here. I had a pretty poor understanding of basic astrophysics. <br><br>So, I was like, "I just need to use whatever I have." And I assumed that the galaxy was a sphere. But the important part was that I knew that we had a star in the center. I assumed that all galaxies had a star in the center. I was like, "I can just calculate the circumference of a sphere with a star in the center that is like, 200 light years across." I imagined the star being like 200 light years across, because that would be big over there. That means that I can travel pretty far without using fuel from the star, because it would be like, "You know, no need to find a gas station on the way." I can literally just travel out of the star's system. I can just go and go and go. <br><br>So, my misunderstanding of it was, "Well, that means I can see black holes in space really easily." I thought that it would be just over the horizon, because I thought that the galaxies were pretty small. I thought that I can just look over there, I can see Earth. I can see other planets. I can see black holes. I can see like, red black holes. I overestimated the size of black holes. Again, fourth grade, so I like, did not know a lot of stuff. I thought that we could see the giant black hole things. The super massive ones. The gigantic ones. I thought that they would be like really big. I imagined them as multiple times the size of a galaxy, with a bunch of things falling into them. I was like over here talking to my friends, and I was like, "If we were to go out of a galaxy, we can see all black holes. We can see black holes just over the horizon. We can see so many black holes." <br><br>When I saw this documentary about black holes, black holes are gigantic. They take up over the multiple galaxies. But, multiple galaxies are not a lot. Galaxies are small. I thought that galaxies over here multiple galaxies. I thought that black holes were gigantic, were gigantic in the sense that they took up galaxies. I thought galaxies were gigantic in the sense that they were gigantic in space. But what I didn't realize was that galaxies were so far away from each other that you could see many galaxies between black holes. <br><br>I later learned that galaxies are multiple light years apart from each other. That black holes are gigantic, but we can't just over here multiple galaxies. We need to go millions of light years before we see a black hole. I thought that galaxies were so small that I overestimated the size of black holes. Galaxies multiple times the size of galaxies. I thought that black holes were gigantic. I thought black holes genuinely were gigantic in the sense that they could like, suck up like, multiple galaxies at the same time. I overestimated the size of black holes because I thought that galaxies were smaller. I genuinely believed that if I was to travel to the galaxy like, billions of light years away, I would see a black hole. <br><br>I genuinely thought that black holes were like, "This big." I was like, "We can just travel multiple galaxies and see like, billions of black holes." But what I didn't realize was that black holes were gigantic. But over the horizon of the universe, a black hole is like tiny. <br><br>So, the most epic thing about space is how it misled me about its enormity.