I wonder what I would've thought if I'd know all that?

I'm 19 and sitting in the front seat of my Corvair convertible with the top down beside Brenda, my not-yet-wife.  Looking up at the late-night sky, all the wisdom of my years converges into an epiphany and I realize why we're all here: for nothing.  It all just happened, and our little minds try to make sense of it by trying to put purpose and "god" into the picture. 

And that settles it for me...for about eighteen more years.

I wonder what my Genius-ness would have concluded if I'd known what I was actually seeing as I stared into that sky?  That the whole thing is so deep that if you launched out of my Corvair front seat at the speed of light, it would take 5 hours to get to Pluto (that was fast!) but then 100,000 more years just to leave our own Milky Way galaxy?  And that there's at least 100 billion more galaxies like ours, and that each galaxy is filled with millions, or billions (or more!) of stars?

Um, that's big... 

You can take that trip to the end of the universe HERE, and at the same time find out why we named a big telescope after Edwin, who spent eight years sitting in a wicker chair squinting thru an eyepiece.  Be sure to click the links when Jeff asks you to.