re: If we're part of the Milky Way, how do we know what it looks like?

Inside the milky way?

When Jody's inside your wife he knows what her outside looks like.

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Voyager. Bitch.

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It took from 1979 to 2013 (34 years!) to exit our solar system (all the planets circling our sun) and now is in real outer-space where it will rock along for 40,000 years before it gets "close" (within 1-2 light years) of the next star.

Think about that as you contemplate about heavy traffic while shopping today

It's more like a glass house and we can see where the seams and such are. We drew it from the inside and inferred by looking outside in on other galaxies.

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That's like saying if you're inside a house you know what the outside looks like.

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there's a massive black hole at the center

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We’re literally circling the drain.

It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning— you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

Hey dude. Kinda like a three musketeers or a snickers with out the nuts. You gave me the munchies man.

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Fun fact: on the clearest of nights your naked eye can only see about one millionth of 1% of all of the stars in the Milky Way.

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Damn! We're insignificant as fawk

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The galaxy doesn't have walls, dumbass.

Nothing that Trump couldn't fix, perhaps.

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We'll make Andromeda pay for it.