Laniakea, the incommensurable paradise
2018

“If Earth is your apartment, the Solar System your city, the Milky Way your region, the Virgo Supercluster your country, then Laniakea is your continent.”  

Laniakea, meaning “incommensurable paradise” in Hawaiian, is named after Hawaii, home to some of the world’s largest telescopes. These instruments revealed this celestial supercontinent, where our galaxy resides, just seven years ago.

Within Laniakea, we—the Milky Way and other galaxies—move at a staggering 630 km/second, and sometimes even 15,000 km/second due to the Universe’s expansion. The galaxies and matter form a network of filaments, weaving around vast voids of dark matter, resembling a river system or a neural network.

Spanning 500 million light-years, Laniakea is vast. Its mass is 100 million billion times that of the Sun and contains 100,000 large galaxies like ours, each holding 100 billion stars. Yet, despite its enormity, Laniakea accounts for merely 1% of the observable Universe, which itself is continually expanding.

Immersed in science fiction, I’m captivated by the idea of infinite worlds, as envisioned by Alessandro Jodorowsky, Moebius, Enki Bilal, Stanley Kubrick, and Ridley Scott. They evoke the notion that reality surpasses our understanding, that we transcend ourselves, and that we are part of something much greater and more distant. Infinity begins within us: our brains contain 100 billion neurons connected by 100 trillion synapses, and each individual is composed of 100 trillion cells. We are both sand and stars.

This dizzying relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, fills me with exhilarating awe for the otherness of it all.