Having developed a bit of an interest in astronomy, I have learned a few things you may find a little mind boggling.
When you go to the Mediterranean and look up at the crystal clear night sky and marvel at the size of the universe, you may be interested to know that every single last one of those lovely little twinkly stars is in fact only in our galaxy, The Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy is visible but only as a very feint smudge and in overall size is many times larger than the Moon.
The Milky Way galaxy is some 100,000 light years across. That means it takes light, @ 186,000 miles per second or approximately 6 million million miles per year, 100,000 years just to cross our galaxy. The Milky Way contains between 200 and 400 thousand million stars. Our Sun is a star and it is thought to be approximately 33,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. Recent analysis suggests there may be approximately 200 thousand million galaxies in the Universe.
The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest neighbour and even that is two and a half million light years away. The nearest star to our solar system is Proxima Centauri, and traveling at the speed of light it would take us 4.2 years to reach it. By comparison it takes the light from our sun just 8 minutes to reach us. We are thinking that Mars may be accessible to us in the next two hundred years. The absolute closest Mars gets to the Earth is 35 million miles. I guess we are a long way from visiting another solar system.
So next time you watch Star Trek it is worth wondering where exactly it is all taking place. As for UFO's - hmmmm. You have to beg the question, if they really came from outer space (wherever that might be) how did they ever find us? We have more chance of finding a colony of microscopic super-beings on the back of one particular flea in a herd of wild camels.
