General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,862 posts)involves an incredibly long journey. Years and years. The nearest star is 4 light years away, meaning it would take four years at light speed to get from there to here. Most stars are farther away. Our galaxy, Milky Way, is some 100,000 light years across. So it would take 100,000 years to go across the galaxy. Think about it.
And think about this. Our galaxy, Milky Way, contains about 300 million stars. Andromeda, about 2.5 million light years away, has about a trillion stars. We are on a collision course. Brace yourselves. In about 3.75 billion years, that's billion with a b, our two galaxies will intersect. Or collide, if you will. A while back I asked My Son the Astronomer, just how many stars will actually crash into each other when that happens. He said, "Well, we're not completely sure, but no more than ten." Think about it. That tells you more than anything else just how vast interstellar distances are. Of course, more stars will gravitationally interact, but only the most minuscule percentage will go BANG into each other.
So any time you see some careless something about some alien species from another galaxy, you can rest assured that will never happen.
I don't know if intelligent aliens have ever visited this planet. But I do know that interstellar distances being what they are, the probably life span of any particular intelligent species being probably less than a million years, and given the current age of the Universe, the chance that two intelligent species could exist at the same time and could have any chance of crossing hundreds or thousands of light years and visit each other is vanishingly small, my best guess is that we are for all practical purposes, alone.
Oh, and for what this is worth, My Son the Astronomer has also told me that current thinking in his field is that given the relatively young age of the Universe, we may well be one of the very first intelligent species to have evolved so far.