surely there must be more

It's been a while since I harped on about space, planets and alternative civilisations on his blog, but while trawling through old images the other day I happened upon one I'd taken of the Milky Way a few years back.

And it got me thinking again.

The image you see is but a fraction of our own galaxy.  But in it there are still probably millions  if not billions of stars, all unimaginably long distances away and all capable of supporting a life-giving solar system

In the upper third of the image, the smudge you see is the Andromeda Galaxy - the Milky Way's "closest" neighbour.  That galaxy too contains hundreds of billions of stars and billions of solar systems.

And beyond that there are at least a billion more galaxies all with more and more billions of stars and planets.

It stands to reason therefore that our little rocky mess can't be the only one out there with things living on it.  There must surely be more civilisations - some more advanced and others behind ours in terms of development.  There just has to be.

It's utterly inconceivable that in all this "space" we are alone.  

Arthur C. Clarke once opined that two possibilities exist: "either we are alone in the Universe or we are not.  Both are equally terrifying."

It is indeed quite terrifying to think that we are utterly alone.  But equally terrifying is the prospect of there being another, far more advanced civilisation, because we don't know what they would think of us here on Earth should they one day find us.

I hope they don't read this blog......