Who's Really On Top?

The concept of the whole big universe is something that has always been hard for me to imagine in its entirety – probably because we have yet to discover so much of it.  It can be described as a black hole, but I think it is so much more than that.  Yes there is lots of empty space, but the universe is also filled with planets, stars, stardust and meteors, and probably so much more that we have yet to discover.  It’s sometimes hard to stop and realize that we are just specks of dust in this huge vast universe.  What makes this idea harder to grapple with is realizing that we know so little about this universe.  We know about the Sun and the planets and stars, but what else is beyond that?  How much more is out there?  Is there a limit or does the universe extend forever in all directions?  I remember watching a movie in a class once about a man who grew up on a movie set of sorts as part of an experiment.  Kind of like the ultimate reality TV show.  He had no idea that his life, from the time he was born, was all a shame.  He thought he was normal like everyone else until something went wrong and he tried to travel far away across the ocean and eventually ran into a façade of the ocean and realized everything he knew was a lie, his friends and family were all just actors playing along in this cruel experiment.  It makes me wonder, when we think about how much more is out there in the universe, are we just someone else’s experiment?  We as humans, and especially Americans, have always seemed to put great emphasis on the concept of manifest destiny.  We were determined to conquer North America, now we are reaching farther to the moon and someday to Mars.  We like to think of ourselves as the supreme beings in the universe, but are we really?  Is there something much greater out there?