| Lyrics | Notes |
|---|---|
| Just remember that you’re standing on a planet ever changing, Rotating at 1,000 miles an hour | Original: Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving, Revolving at 900 miles an hour “If you were to hang above the surface of the Earth at the equator without moving, you would see 25,000 miles pass by in 24 hours, at a speed of 25000/24 or just over 1000 miles per hour.”* |
| It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second,* so it’s reckoned | 19 miles per second = 68,400 miles per hour. “Earth is also moving around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour.”* |
| A sun that is the source of all our power | “The energy we capture for use on Earth comes largely from the Sun or from nuclear forces local to our own planet. Sunlight is by far the predominant source, and it contains a surprisingly large amount of energy.”* |
| The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way | 1 million miles per day = 41,667 miles per hour. “Relative to the local standard of rest, our Sun and the Earth are moving at about 43,000 miles per hour (70,000 km/hr) roughly in the direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation of Lyra….”* |
| Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars | “We can only see a few thousand stars at most with our unaided eyes. These are a mixture of stars which are nearby, and bright stars which are further away; but they are only a tiny fraction of the 100,000,000,000 stars in our own galaxy.”* |
| It’s 100,000 light years side to side | “The disk of the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter (one light year is about 9.5 x 10^15 meters).”* |
| It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick | “The central bulge is about 16,000 light years thick.”* |
| But out by us, it’s just 1,000 light years high | Original: But out by us, it’s just 3,000 light years wide. “Astronomers estimate that the disk in the vicinity of the Sun is relatively thin—‘only’ 300 pc thick….”* 300 pc (parsecs) = 978.47 light years |
| We’re 30,000 light years from galactic central point | “Of course, the edge on perspective represents the view from the vicinity of our Sun, a star located in the disk about 30,000 light years out from the center.”* |
| We go ’round every two hundred million years | “At this rate it takes us 240 million years to make one revolution around the galactic core.”* |
| And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe | |
| The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whiz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know 11 million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is | Originally, “12 million miles a minute.” The speed of light is actually about 671 million mph which is 11,183,333 miles per minute. |
| So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure How amazingly unlikely is your birth And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space ‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth |
