Perspective

There are an estimated 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 100 sextillion, stars in the universe.  It is also estimated to be greater than 150 billion light years in diameter (a light year is 9,500,000,000,000 km) and almost 14 billion years old.   

The circumference of the Earth is ~40,000 km, or 0.000000004% the distance of a light year.  Consider the distances you are familiar with that seem far or difficult to overcome due to lack of funds to pay for a plane ticket or time off from work or school.  These distances are nothing against the universe.  The life span of the average North American, ~80 years, is 0.000000005% the age of the universe.  Consider all the events you will experience in your life.  Your life span is unrecorded against the history of the universe.

Imagine, 110 years ago our species hadn't made a plane that could fly.  By boat it took weeks to months to circumnavigate the globe.  The fastest speed reached by a manned winged aircraft is 7,273 km/h in 1967 in the X-15, or a speed fast enough to fly around the globe in 5 1/2 hours.  The fastest speed ever achieved by a human was in the Apollo 10 spaceship, ~39,000 km/h.  Voyager 1 has traveled past the edge of our solar system at a speed slightly over 62,000 km/h, and the fastest speed ever reached by a man-made object was Helios 2 at 241,400 km/h.  

Even at traveling as fast as Helios 2 it would take 6450 years to reach our closest neighbor star Alpha Centauri, which is a little over 4 light years from our sun.  Perhaps the closest solar system with a planet in a habitable zone orbit is Tau Ceti, 12 light years away.

Will our species ever be more than a grain of sand on the beach of the universe?  Will we ever be able to even get from our grain of sand to the one next to ours?  The average animal species has a life-span of 1 to 2 million years, and we have already blown about 200,000 of those years just to get to this point.  We better get moving...