"If the size of a planetary system in which the Earth is hardly seen as a grain of sand fills the understanding with astonishment, how delightfully astounded we will be when we examine the infinite crowd of worlds and systems which fill the totality of the Milky Way. But how much greater this wonder when we know that all these immeasurable arrangements of stars once again create a numbered unity, whose end we do not know and which is perhaps, like the previous one, inconceivably large and yet, once again, only a unit in a new numbered system." - Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1755, fully 150 years before astronomers were able to demonstrably measure and appreciate the scale of the universe.