Here’s a neat little YouTube video about the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way:

Our solar system is located in a smaller arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, an average size galaxy with about 500 million stars. Our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy is twice as large, some scientists estimate that there are more than a trillion stars there.

We orbit an average star, in an average galaxy. Our technology isn’t even good enough to send a human to Jupiter yet. We tend to overestimate our importance, but what if civilizations like ours are pretty common? 500 million stars in this galaxy, a trillion more over in Andromeda… with BILLIONS of additional galaxies out there?

Even a hostile and bloodthirsty race of aliens that loves to kill for sport would have to sort through millions of stars to find us… then sort through all the planets circling each star. Finding our planet, in our solar system, in our galaxy is like finding one grain of sand on a beach that stretches a thousand miles.

Of course, in human history we have become less violent as we’ve become more educated and advanced. It takes learning and cooperation among many individuals to develop civilization and technology. This means that advanced societies will probably become LESS violent over time, not more so.

Any race that is overtly violent would probably destroy itself soon after the discovery of atomic weapons, and long before they can master space travel. Even today humans are at risk of a nuclear war that decimates our planet, hopefully we’ll move past this stage and make it to a era when atomic weapons are no longer needed.

Any aliens that have mastered interstellar travel will be pretty bored by our current technology. Nothing new at this planet, we haven’t even figured out how to cure cancer, or how to travel through wormholes.

The laws of mathematics, physics, and chemistry are the same in the rest of the universe. Aliens probably know all about radio waves, atomic weapons, genetics, and all the other cool stuff we’ve discovered over the last 10,000 years.

Interstellar aliens won’t need our raw materials or resources, with billions of stars in each galaxy there are countless planets out there with every resource imaginable. Why stop at Earth and mess with humans when countless other uninhabited planets are available to exploit at will?

We began broadcasting radio signals about 80 years ago, those signals would have traveled outward in a sphere 160 light years across. In a galaxy that’s 100,000 light years in diameter 160 light years is tiny. Even if some aliens have detected us they can watch our broadcast signals for a few days and see that we’re still not that advanced.

Most of the TV signals hurtling through space right now celebrate the stupidity of humans; the Simpsons, All in the Family, any sitcom from the 1980’s…

There is probably another way to broadcast a radio signal (and travel through space) using quantum mechanics, wormholes and extra-dimensionality. Perhaps this will allow us to communicate across far greater galactic distances with no lag in time. The current technology is too slow, even traveling at the speed of light the nearest star is 2.5 years from our planet.

Until then? Aliens probably don’t know we exist, but even if they do we’re still pretty backward and boring.

Until we develop better technology we remain the hillbillies of the universe.

Ben Alexander

February . 2017