Jake Thunberg

Why We Might Be Alone in the Universe

Are we the only living things in the universe? That is a scary question to think about. Our observable universe stretches out 90,000,000,000 light years in diameter containing 100,000,000,000 galaxies each with 100,000,000,000 stars. Recently we just found out that planets are very common too. So, there should be lots of opportunity for life to develop and exist, but where is it? Shouldn't the universe be teeming with spaceships? Even if there are any alien civilizations in other galaxies, there is no way we'll ever know about them. Anything that is outside of our galactic "Local Group" is pretty much out of our reach forever, because of how fast our universe is expanding. Even if we had science fiction technology that could make our spaceships travel at the speed of light, it would literally take billions of years to reach these places. Traveling through the emptiest places in the universe.