Cosmologists predict that our very own galaxy, the Milky Way, is set to collide with a neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda. A galaxy, on the average, has about one trillion stars. Andromeda has about 1.2 trillion stars, bigger that our Milky Way, which has about a mere 800 billion stars.
But do not worry because this will occur in about 100 million years, when we are all dead. A galactic collision does not mean the stars will collide. They will simply pass each other, but in the process, the massive electro-magnetic maelstrom will result in the birth and death of millions of stars. The collision will take a few million years.
The observable or known Universe is whatever we can ‘see’ from light coming to Earth. We cannot see beyond because light travelling from great distances has not yet reached us. Beyond that, we do not have an idea or consciousness of this unknown Universe. The known Universe is about 50 billion light years in diameter, where there are about 100 billion galaxies, each having an average of a trillion stars. So there are about 50 billion trillion stars (21 zeroes). That is how small we are, and how vast the Kingdom of God is, at least part of it.
Our next door neighbour, the galaxy Andromeda is the nearest to our Milky Way, a mere 20 million light years away.
However, because of consciousness, we are just as “big” or even bigger because what we see becomes part of us. What we see becomes what we are. In that sense, the physical Universe is spiritualized in our consciousness. Whenever we pray “Your kingdom come” we are asking God to ‘lend’ us this vast awesome kingdom. The Universe is mirrored in our souls. Our consciousness thus transcends time and space. We are small and big at the same time, small because we are a speck in the vast known Universe, big because the vast Universe is within our consciousness, our minds, our souls, and become part of our existence.
As the Hubble space telescope probes deeper and deeper into space, our consciousness expands with it to the outer limits that it is able to photograph in extreme high resolution.
About a hundred billion years ago, there was a super-nova, a massive explosion of all explosions whose light illuminated half of the known Universe. Its remnants now form the Virgo super-cluster, our home. In that explosion, the first heavy metals were formed at millions of degrees Centigrade. Those heavy metals are now in our blood — iron, zinc, and more. It is therefore accurate to say that we came from stardust and to stardust we shall return, that is, billions of years from now — when our sun expands into a red giant, then collapses into a white dwarf, then collapse further into a black hole, then becomes a nova. We return to our roots, the stars. Seemingly, we are of star material, a cosmic brew that developed consciousness.