Thursday, March 26, 2009

Some thoughts

I want to thank everyone for their thoughts from my previous post; I appreciated the advice and general support I got, all of it helped.

Also I just wanted to write down a couple things I learned. Did you know that there are fewer stars in the galaxy then there are dollars in the national debt? To be fair it should be said the US GDP is a lot larger than the number of stars in the galaxy as well. It is so hard to comprehend how much money is being spent by the government. To give everyone an idea I have posted a couple pictures of various galaxies.
The picture on the right is of two galaxies colliding, the one on the left is the Eagle nebula, one of my favorite pictures taken by the hubble telescope.
I tried to find accurate numbers for stars in a galaxy but because of the size it is impossible to count but the numbers are estimated around 200 billion (for the Milky Way at least, I am assuming other galaxies are of comparable size). In my brief search I could find a specific number for the national debt either but I think the number is around $10 trillion, about 50 times larger than 200 billion. And another number of interest, there are apparently around 6.8 billion people in the world.

3 comments:

carrie said...

Amazing photos! Truly awe inspiring. Also awe-full is that dollar amount; I never imagined it could be so large!

The Mrs. said...

So, with the various bailouts that have been handed out, it was figured that 80% of American mortgages could have been paid off. A friend of mine suggested that they should have just spent a little extra and paid off all of Americas mortgages.
I think that would help the "economy" better than giving it to AIG, or Fanny May (seeing as how they spend their money anyway).

Just think of the economy stimulating things I would do if I didn't have a mortgage.

Sheesh.
Jamee

Tia said...

I love the pictures of the galaxies.

But the picture I like the best is the one at the top of your blog. That is an incredible picture.