I believe if life is common than there must of been at least one group of aliens that at least attempted to colonize it self everywhere in space?

Unless humans are a extreme anomaly and that most other aliens don’t really care about space exploration, and just focus on their home planet.

  • zeal0telite [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Travelling at literally the fastest possible speed we're aware something can travel at it would take 4 years to reach our next closest star. If you wanted to say "hello" to someone on Mars it would take 3 minutes to reach them, and that's at our closest orbits.

    Space is infinitely big. It is so incomprehensibly big that humans cannot really conceive of it. If you could, it would drive you mad.

    If someone were to look across the galaxy at Earth with intense detail they would be getting images of the first Homo Sapiens leaving the African continent.

    • communism_liker_69 [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This fails to really reckon with deep time. Yes the Universe is unimaginably large, but time is also unimaginably deep. Von Neumann probes with modest replication rates and interstellar cruise speeds could colonize the Milky Way in a few million years, which is exceptionally quick.

      One of the things that's always bothered me is the "when you look out at the night sky, most of the stars you're seeing are already dead!" line because it's just flat wrong. You can't really see stars more than a few thousand light years away, and even 10,000 years is quite short on stellar lifetimes. The only stars that are likely in our sky but already gone are supergiants already on the verge of collapse like Betelgeuse.