n a stately manner, moving at only about 220 miles an ime to time some of ts are nudged out of t by some sligational perturbation—a passing star perimes ted into tiness of space, never to be seen again, but sometimes to a long orbit aroundt ts, pass tem. Just occasionally tray visitors smack into somet’s oer of tem. It is is going to take a long time to get tleast—so for nourn to it mucer in tory.
So t’s your solar system. And tem? ell,not deal, depending on it.
In t term, it’s not perfect vacuum ever created by asempty as tiness of interstellar space. And t deal of tilyou get to t bit of somet neigauri,ar cluster knoerms, but t is still a imes fartrip to the Moon.
to reac by spacesake at least ty-five trip you still be any a lonely clutcars in t no-years of travel. And so it ried to star-he cosmos.
Just reacer of our oake far longer ted asbeings.
Space, let me repeat, is enormous. tance betars out t speeds approac, tasticallycances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible t alien beingstravel billions of miles to amuse ting crop circles in iltsening ts out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona(t eenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.
Still, statistically ty t t there is good.
Nobody knoimates range from 100 billionor so to per one of 140 billion or so ot Cornell namedFrank Drake, excited by suc a famous equation designed tocalculate ties.
Under Drake’s equation you divide tars in a selected portion of tars t are likely to ary systems; divide t by tary systems t could tically support life; divide t by to a state of intelligence; and so on. At eac even conservative inputs tions just in t to be somewhemillions.
an interesting and exciting t. e may be only one of millions of advancedcivilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, tance betions is reckoned to be at least t makes it sound. It means for a start t even if to see us in telescopes, tc t