Space is Super Huge.

Something I've been pondering on today...


I sometimes think about space, and how large our galaxy is, and how much distance is between us and our celestial neighbors...and how alone we are here, on this planet, in this sun system. We learn in high school that "light years" means how many years it takes for light to travel through a vacuum. So, for a star that is twenty light years away, it took twenty years for its light to reach our eyes. Follow?


Okay, so here's the deal: our scientists have found a planet that they say could harbor life, as it lies within its star's "Goldilocks Zone" -- the place within a star's orbit where a planet could harbor life. So, SETI pointed their radio telescopes at the star, and what did they hear?


Silence.


Why? The star is 180 light years away from earth. If there were beings on HIP 116454 b (seriously, we need a better exoplanet naming scheme), of similar intelligence to humans, and they were looking at the earth through their fancy radio telescopes, you know what they would hear?


Also silence.


The first radio waves strong enough to leave earth only happened 100 years ago. If there are any civilizations out there within our astronomical neighborhood, they need to be within a hundred light years of us. And then, there's the next question -- what are the odds of an alien civilization being alive and of comparable intelligence as us living at the same time as us?




#mindblown