Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown

[elperromagico]

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 900 miles an hour
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power

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 the Galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick
But out by us it's just 3,000 light years wide

We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every 200 million years
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, the speed of light you know
12 million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

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
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth

"Galaxy Song" by Eric Idle

[bigmonkey]

1. The numbers in this song are accurate!

I took an astronomy course about 10 years ago, and our first assignment was to check these numbers out for accuracy. He rounded off slightly, but the upshot is that if you memorize this song, you are actually memorizing the correct astronomical data.

[elperromagico]

2. Well, he's a Cambridge grad,

so you can be sure he studied a great deal of this stuff. :D