Where do homo sapiens live in the universe and who is their closest neighbor?

Are we in the far reaches of space? Is the Universe a desert with just a few oasis of sentient life?



Is our sun part of someone else's constellation?Where do homo sapiens live in the universe and who is their closest neighbor?Yes we, and every other solar system is in "the far reaches of space". This is because space itself is vast nearly beyond imagination. There simply is no such thing as "close by" when speaking of other solar systems. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, or to write it out: 6,000,000,000,000 miles. The nearest star system of Alpha Centauri is over 4 light years, and that's not even beginning to scratch the universe's surface, so to speak. When talking distances merely within our own galaxy, distances of hundreds or even thousands of light years are typical.



So, rather than think of the universe as a desert, think more of an unimaginably vast ocean with only small islands and no continents and no other islands visible from one another above the horizon. And although there are a lot of islands in total, they are so spread out that they cannot normally be detected from each other. Oh, one more thing, only a few percentage of these islands are inhabited by intelligent life.



Now if you were standing on the surface of a hypothetical planet orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars (it is a triple star system) and were looking up at the night sky you would see a yellow star added to the constellation Cassiopeia. As you get farther from the Sun into our galaxy eventually none of the constellations have any familiar shapes or stars.Where do homo sapiens live in the universe and who is their closest neighbor?Our galaxy is at the center of the universe. Everything else in the universe is moving away from us. This is true no matter where in the universe you are. Weird, huh?