Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, sums up how the universe is both incomprehensibly vast and quite personal.
In my time on Hubble we’d routinely see background galaxies that were well over a billion light years away. Routinely. Mind you, each of these background objects is itself an entire galaxy, containing tens or hundreds of billion of stars, perhaps as big, rich, and diverse as our own Milky Way.
…
Some people feel small, insignificant, when they look out into all that space, all that blackness. It’s easy to feel that way, but it’s not a fair assessment. It can be a struggle, and a mighty one, but it’s worth the effort to seek out the awe and the grandeur in it as well. In all that vastness, all that depth, it’s entirely possible there are trillions of planets like Earth, and maybe more. But none is this Earth. Nowhere else is there another you, another me.In the end, when you make that effort, this is one of most important lessons you learn: we’re a part of all this. A unique part. And that’s a fine thing to know.