Yakko's Universe

by Randy Rogel

from the Warner Brothers cartoon ``Animaniacs''

(Annotated by S. C. Smith)

Everybody lives on a street in a city or a village or a town, for what it's worth
And they're all inside a country, which is part of a continent that sits upon a planet known as Earth
And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains which is out there spinning silently in space
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals and also the entire human race

Excepting those currently living on the International Space Station, but close enough!

It's a great big universe, and we're all really puny, We're just little tiny specks about the size of Mickey Rooney
It's big and black and inky, and we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not

And we're part of a vast interplanetary system stretching seven hundred billion miles long

A bit of an exaggeration: That's about 7525 AU. The diameter of the solar system (based on Pluto's orbit) is only about 80 AU. If we measure the solar system as extending out to the Oort cloud, it may be as much as 200,000 AU in diameter, in which case this is an underestimate. In any case, it's not an accurate measurement of any physical system that we are a part of.

With nine planets and a sun, we think the Earth's the only one that has life on it, although we could be wrong

What do you mean ``we''? Even discounting people who think they were abducted by aliens, there is a substantial fraction of the population (including many scientists) who think there is life to be found out there.

Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids, including meteors and Halley's comet too

There's a lot wrong with this line:

• ``interstellar voids'' implies outside the solar system. All items mentioned are part of the solar system.
• There are only about 10,000 - 1,000,000 asteroids (depending on how you define asteroid - the smaller number would include only those larger than about 10km, while the larger would include objects as small as 1km). There are certainly billions of pieces of interplanetary debris in the solar system if we include small enough objects, but one would not wish to classify a marble as an asteroid.
• Asteroids, meteors, and comets are very different classes of objects. Asteroids are large, irregular rocky or metallic objects that independently orbit the sun in the inner solar system. Comets are icy objects whose orbits generally stretch into the outer reaches of the solar system. A meteoroid is a small chunk of debris in space. A meteor is the same chunk after it has entered Earth's atmosphere (also called a ``shooting star''). A meteorite is that same chunk after it hits the surface of the Earth (assuming any of it has survived the meteor phase).

And there's over 50 moons floating out there like balloons in a panoramic trillion-mile view

There are at least 60 known moons. The figure may yet increase.

And still it's all a speck amid a hundred billion stars in a galaxy we call the Milky Way
It's 60 thousand trillion miles from one end to the other, and still that's just a fraction of the way

That's somewhat less than 10,000 light years, less than 10% of the diameter of the galaxy.

'Cause there's a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky, filled with constellations, planets, moons, and stars
And still the universe extends to a place that never ends, which is maybe just inside a little jar

Here we get into the tricky business of cosmology. Is the universe finite or infinite? Is there anything ``outside'' it. Are there other universes. Surprisingly enough, all these are possibilities.

It's a great big universe, and we're all really puny,
We're just little tiny specks about the size of Mickey Rooney
Though we don't know how it got here, we're an important part here
It's a big universe and it's ours