Is There Anybody Out There?....

  It is hard for me to imagine that we, the Human Race, can be so conceited as to think that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.  That being said, I think it is highly unlikely that we will actually ever encounter an alien race.  It is probably a good thing, too, since we can't even get along with our own kind on our own planet.

  Just the region visible from Earth (the observable universe) is about 92 billion light years across.  That comes out to 540,833,960,000,000,000,000,000 miles.  Again, that is the observable universe or the part we can see, not the entire universe which some believe is infinite.  It is highly unlikely that we would ever come up with the technology to traverse such great distances.  Hmmm, at one time, didn't we say we would never be able to go into space?  So whether it is by default or design, it is in our best interest that we have these great distances between us and any other intelligent beings in the universe.  As the expression goes, "Good fences make good neighbors".  Otherwise, we would most likely have conflicts with them as well as our earthly neighbors.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein