Aliens Apart

Some scientists find it remarkable that our Universe and in particular our planet is so well suited to life as we know it. But it seems obvious that life as we know it could only crop up in an environment hospitable to it. It's like sitting around on acid marveling at the sound of your own voice.

And now we can all marvel at just how far apart possible alien civilizations are.

There's another property of the universe that's equally noteworthy: It's set up in a way that keeps everyone isolated.

We learned this relatively recently. The big discovery took place in 1838, when Friedrich Bessel beat out his telescope-wielding buddies to first measure the distance to a star other than the sun. 61 Cygni, a binary star in our own back yard, turned out to be about 11 light-years away. For those who, like Billy Joel, are fond of models, think of it this way: If you shrank the sun to a ping-pong ball and set it down in New York's Central Park, 61 Cygni would be a slightly smaller ball near Denver.

Unfortunately that model, which Billy Joel probably wouldn't even look sideways at, is useless to most people. In order to understand it, people would need a good grasp on just how fucking huge the Sun really is. They forget that you could easily fit all the planets inside the Sun, but only if it were a hollow sphere instead of a raging nuclear furnace. But that is also pointless to most people since they have no clue just how fucking huge Jupiter is when compared to the Earth. And the Earth is pretty fucking big, too. And only a third of it is land. And only a small portion of that is inhabited. And people feel like they have to drive to a place more than five blocks from their residence.

So next to that ping-pong ball is a BB. On that BB is a tiny stain. And somewhere on that tiny stain is an insignificant speck. And your home, along with the homes of millions of other people, is somewhere on that speck, on the stain, on the BB, next to the ping-pong ball, in Central Park, and now you want to go visit a friend who also lives in a speck on a similar stain on something tiny orbiting a super ball somewhere near Denver.

That's one hell of a booty call.