Why There Ain't No Aliens Probing Hillbillies Except That Time I Bagged Daisy Duke

Hey, I wasn't from Hazzard County, so that makes me an alien, am I right?  And that telepathy thing counts, too, which is how come I never had to leave the recliner. Ask around, it's in the rules.

Anyhow, this results from an argument with a friend who, although he means well, is dumber than a box of hair on stuff like this. But, since I'm still in "the mode," let me get it out:

Answer: Because we're just not that important.

Well, more to the point, because our little piss-ant solar system isn't.

Look, here's the thing; the observable universe has about 200,000,000,000 (that's 200 billion) galaxies. 

Now, to get a picture of that, get yourself about three and a half cups of talc (baby powder) and dump in on the table. Look at it closely - it's made of grains that are about 10 microns across. To compare, blood cells are about 8 microns. The smallest thing you can see is about 40 microns, which means that the talc is so small, it looks like smoke when the wind catches it, because we can't see the individual grains. And 3.5 cups contains about (surprise!) 200,000,000,000 of them. So, here's an idea. Let's pretend each of those so-small-they-almost-don't-exist flakes or grains, or whatever you like represents a galaxy.

Now scoop that 3.5 cups into a large baggie and take it to the upper level of Cowboy Stadium in Dallas. Taking your time to make sure it doesn't clump, let a big fan blow it gently out into the room, so that it's just hanging there like smoke. When it finally disperses, filling the area as well as possible, you have a very-badly UNDERSCALED representation of our universe, or at least the visible parts of it.

(For it to be to scale, we'd need planetary-sized volumes instead of the piss-ant-sized Cowboys Stadium, but those are annoyingly difficult to imagine, so just go with me here.)

Grab your microscope and sample random bits of the place till you happen to find one of these rare, invisible flakes of the now-dispersed powder hanging in the volume.  Get that one hanging about 30 feet off the ground at about the 50 yard line - it should be a good representative sample.

That flake, that bit that you can't see at all except at pretty high magnification is our galaxy.

And since that so-small it almost doesn't exist at all chunk is our galaxy, that means that light itself takes  somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 years just to make it from one side of it to another - about 4 microns.

I'll let you do the math, but at a top speed of 4 micons per 100,000+ years, it's gonna take awhile to get to the end zone, never mind Jerry Jones's luxury suite.  So that, combined with the simply enormous distances between the talc particles/galaxies means there's no universal exploration nor any visits from another galaxy, for sure.

OK, if not inter-galactic, how about just within our 50-yard-line talc grain, within our own galaxy?

Anyone, the argument goes, can take a look up at midnight, especially with a small lens, or binoculars, or even with the naked eye, and see the smoky tendrils of the galactic core (aka the Milky Way) and the simply uncountable number of stars blanketing us in every direction.  In skies that crowded, with that much - well, "stuff" - in it at every direction, how is it possible that we haven't been contacted? If there's interstellar travel going on, or intelligent species chatting, how is it possible that they wouldn't accidentally crash land here every 10 or 12 years, lured in by our technology and old episodes of "I Love Lucy?"

Supporting this idea is that every estimate by anyone who knows anything (including me) indicates that there are at least tens of thousands and perhaps millions of intelligent species just in our galaxy.

Couldn't SOME of them have sorted it out and come along to give us the big "howdy," which, of course, our government is hiding from us?

Well, no. You're making what I like to call the "Bowl Of The Ancients" error. Back in the day, the ancients thought that the night sky was an ebony bowl with holes punched in it so the stars would shine through or, alternately, with lamps hanging from it. Depending on the ancient consulted, the bowl was generally about as high off the ground as Olympus or, occasionally, the moon. 

Too high to reach, in other words, but not like really NUTS out of reach, and certainly within comprehensible distances.

In our modern times, of course, we recognize that the night sky is in fact infinitely deep and that objects we see in it are REALLY far away. 

But that's just math.  We don't really believe it.

Deep down inside each of us, you see, exists this little homing beacon on a mental map that tries to orient us, that tells us "YOU ARE HERE." It doesn't grasp big stuff very well, having been evolutionarily designed mostly to make sure that we could remember where the next watering hole was in our wanderings without having to re-find it every single time. So as far as that personal beacon is concerned - as far as we are concerned - all that galactic show is a manageable distance away, and our place in it is - here. But it's just not so. Light from the other side of our galaxy started this direction almost before we were even recognizably human, some 120,000 years ago.

Still not getting it? That's because we consider it "our" galaxy. That automatically almost makes it a local phenomenon, as anything that's "ours" is.

Let's go back to our talc, since you've already been putzing around with it anyway.

This time, instead of galaxies, let's say each bit of it represents a star.  Let's find out how many invisible grains of talc it will take to represent all the stars within - oh say a 20-light-year diameter sphere around us (10 light-years in any direction, in other words.)

Ten light years is nothing - in Star Trek movies, they can clip that off in seconds. So that's pretty local, right?  OK, so here they are, all the stars within 10 light-years. Turns out there are eleven of them, and from nearest to furthest, they are (listing distances, names, and the constellations you can find them in):

• 4.22 light years     Proxima Centauri, in Centaurus
• 4.40 light years     Alpha Centauri A, in Centaurus
• 4.40 light years    Alpha Centauri B, in Centaurus
• 5.96 light years    Barnard's Star, in Ophiuchus
• 7.78 light years    Wolf 359, in Leo
• 8.31 light years    Lalande 21185, in Ursa Major
• 8.60 light years     Sirius A, in Canis Major
• 8.60 light years    Sirius B, in Canis Major
• 8.72 light years    Luyten 726-8 A, in Cetus
• 8.72 light years    UV Ceti, in Cetus
• 9.68 light years    Ross 154, in Sagittarius

So, let's reduce our 20-light year diameter sphere down to a manageable scale more-or-less consistent with our eleven invisible grains of talc. Say, Central Park, in NYC.

You can do the math yourself, if you like, but what you wind up with is a volume of space that can be defined as turning Central Park into a single room with walls over 2000' (about .4 miles) high. Now take our eleven invisible talc particles representing our stars and scatter them at random throughout that enormous volume, occasionally grouped as pairs or triplets. They would be virtually motionless as far as we could tell, because on this scale, light, which travels so fast that throughout most of human history it didn't occur to us that it travelled at all, only travels about .9 inches per hour. In a full 24-hour day, light would travel less than 2 feet, and in a year, about 650 feet. And it still wouldn't be but 1/4 of the way to the nearest other motionless flake of talc.

There's your picture of starry space. They didn't tell you that on Star Trek.

But maybe that's not fair. Let's put the rest of the galaxy into our model.

To do that, take the rest of your talc (only 1 3/4 cups of it, this time - there are after all only 100 billion stars in our almost aggressively ordinary galaxy) and spread it more-or-less evenly, with clumps and streaks and bumps across a volume about FOUR TIMES the volume of the ENTIRE EARTH. 

And there's our galaxy, with all the gravity, and rays, and light, and radio signals, and energies, and psi power, and karma, and positive vibes -

creeping across it at - .9 inches per hour.

Which, by the way, is an important reason that no aliens are paying attention to our speed-of-light radio signals. On this scale, since usable radio and television have only been broadcasting for - oh, hell, I'm easy, let's give it the benefit of the doubt - 100 years, that means that our "sphere" of broadcasts is now some 200 light-years across (100 light-years in each direction, right?)

Or, if you prefer, we have blanketed almost 0.2% of the galaxy. (Actually, it's not nearly that much - we're in a pretty thinly populated neighborhood, and it's gonna be 50-60 thousand years before the classier, higher density parts of the galaxy like the core are going to hear anything.)

In other words, 99.8% of the galaxy hasn't heard from us, and most of them won't for another 75,000 years or so, just as a matter of pure physics. What about our little Voyager plaque that says "Hi, There!" to the whole universe, launched some 33 years ago (1977?)

It had just as well never left the ground, for all the distance it's covered on the galactic scale is concerned, as on that scale, the difference between where it is and where it started is close enough to zero to be negligible.

Here, go play with this for awhile; put it on "full screen" for the cool effect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

In Our Next Episode: Fun With Astrology: We discuss the odds that all this is arranged in the sky over the last 13 or 14 billion years in order to spell out cryptic messages to slowly-evolving apes on a backwater planet out in a galactic arm. 

HINT: Zero.