THE UNIVERSE

Have you ever seen those ads that invite you to send $20.00, or whatever, and you will get a star named after you?  Of course, it's a rip-off but you may not realize how much of a rip-off it is.

Let's put this in perspective.  As far as astronomers can compute, there are A TRILLION BILLION STARS IN THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE.  I say visible universe because we don't know how far the universe goes, or if there's any end to it at all.  In any event, what we can see is a lot of stars.

How big a number is a trillion billion?  Well, that's more stars than Bill Gates has dollars.  That's for sure.  In fact, it's more dollars than there are in the whole world, even though it's close to the national debt.

If you put it into digits it would look like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.  To give you another illustration of how many stars that is, the total comes out to 10 BILLION STARS FOR EVERY HUMAN BEING WHO HAS EVER EXISTED ON THIS PLANET.

So next time you look into the stary, stary night, remember that 10 billion of those stars are all yours.  And, if you really believe this government will ever balance its budget, you're as far out of this world as your stars are.