Rama's Happy Thoughts

Check out this excellent visual: You start at 10^23 meters out on the galaxy and travel through 'powers of ten' and end up at quark size inside of an atom of the leaf.

As an additional exercise, reflect on the this song from Monty Python's Meaning of Life:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles per hour
It's orbiting at nineteen miles per second, so it's reckoned
The Sun that is the source of all our power
The Sun, and you, and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are travelling at a million miles per day
In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles per hour
In the galaxy we call the Milky Way

The galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us it's just three thousand light years wide
We're thirty thousand light years from Galactic Central Point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
The fastest it can go
The speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is
So, remember when you're feeling down and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth

lyrics courtesy of astro

For your aural pleasure, listen to the above galaxy song as you watch the visual.