It takes over 8 minutes for the photons from the Sun to reach earth. The photons travel at the speed of light, obviously. So traveling at the maximum allowable relativistic speed it still takes minutes for them to get here and that's from the nearest star to our planet.
The milky way is 100,000 light years in diameter. It will take you 100,000 years to get from one end to the other traveling at the speed of light. We're talking about one galaxy here. There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe from estimates. The numbers are too enormous for us to comprehend. The distances are so vast, the possibility of there being hundreds of intelligent life forms in our own galaxy and not run into each other is still plausible.
Also, we're giving ourselves a lot of credit here. Why would an advanced civilization that can travel thousands of light years want to bother with us anyway? To them, we're nothing special. I'm sure they have other concerns to look after. Not one measly tiny planet. If i'm running a galactic civilization, i'm probably gonna be more worried about the Andromedans that are harvesting the energy from black holes to run their super massive collider weapons than the teeny weeny earthlings.
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