Virgo Supercluster

Galactic islands are separated by millions and millions of light years.

And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs is roughly 110 million light years in diameter.

And that's only one of many likely infinite superclusters in the universe.

Wait, literally infinite? Wow! Unfortunately, we can't know whether the universe truly is infinite or not because of a little thing called the cosmic horizon.

On the modified Sagan scale using megawatts, K1 is around 10 to 10 megawatts, K2 is around 10 to 20 megawatts, K3 around 10 to 30 megawatts, and K4 around 10 to 40 megawatts.

The Virgo supercluster comes in around K3.9 on that scale, and the larger Lanakia supercluster is roughly K4 or a bit above.

The entire observable universe today is only around K4.7, not K9 or K100, because each Kardashev step is huge.

Ten orders of magnitude is a long staircase.

And what happens to life in that era? Civilizations may have persisted or even started from scratch in the red dwarf era, but they'll have lost all connection with the greater universe before it ends.

Long before the last red dwarf fades out, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have dragged all galaxies beyond the Virgo Supercluster outside of the cosmic event horizon.

That's the boundary of our patch of the universe beyond which no new light can reach us.

The greater universe will fade from view, and even the cosmic microwave background will also dim to undetectability within the era of red dwarfs.

The universal laws of physics are the most terrifying weapons, and also the most effective defenses.

Whether it's by the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy, at the scale of the Local Galactic Group or the Virgo Supercluster, those warring civilizations possessing godlike technology will not hesitate to use the universal laws of physics as weapons.

There are many laws that can be manipulated into weapons, but most commonly the focus is on spatial dimensions and the speed of light.

Typically, lowering spatial dimensions is a technique for attack, and lowering the speed of light is a technique for defense.

It's still science, of course, but astronomy puts you in your place.

Because of astronomy, I know we're standing on a sphere of mostly molten rock and metal 13,000 kilometers across with a fuzzy atmosphere about 100 kilometers high, surrounded by a magnetic field that protects us from the onslaught of subatomic particles from the sun 150 million kilometers away, which is also flooding space with light that reaches across space to illuminate the planets, asteroids, dust, and comets, racing out past the Kuiper Belt, through the Oort Cloud, into interstellar space, past the nearest stars, which orbit along with gas clouds and dust lanes in a gigantic spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way that has a supermassive black hole in its center and is surrounded by 150 globular clusters and a halo of dark matter and dwarf galaxies, some of which it's eating, all of which can be seen by other galaxies in our local group, like Andromeda and Triangulum, and our group is on the outskirts of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, which is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is just one of many other gigantic structures that stretch most of the way across the visible universe, which is 90 billion light-years across and expanding every day, even faster today than yesterday, due to mysterious dark energy, and even all that might be part of an infinitely larger multiverse that extends forever, both in time and space.

See? Astronomy puts you in your place.

But what exactly is astronomy? This isn't necessarily an obvious thing to ask.

It is a single piece of the Milky Way's spiral architecture.

The galaxy itself is incomparably larger, and beyond the galaxy lies the Local Group, and beyond that the Virgo Supercluster, and beyond that the Laniakea Supercluster, and beyond that the observable universe stretching 93 billion light-years across.

But we are not talking about any of that.

We are talking only about the arm, the local arm, the one we live in, the one that most people have never heard of or have glanced at on a diagram and immediately forgotten.

The galaxy spans roughly 100,000 light years across, and contains hundreds of billions of stars distributed across multiple spiral arms, a central bar, a bulge, a thin disk, a thick disk, and an enormous dark matter halo extending far beyond the visible structure.

The Milky Way sits inside the Local Group.

The Local Group sits inside the Virgo Supercluster.

The Virgo Supercluster sits inside the La Nikaya Supercluster.