“The feeling of being stuck on Earth."

People like to wax on about the Fermi Paradox, but I think it has a really simple solution: space is big.

Like, really big.

Like, even bigger than you’re thinking right now - which I’m sure is very big, but still not even remotely close to the truth.

I feel like the term “lightyear” gets downplayed a lot. It’s the fastest thing in the known universe, traveling unimpeded, 24/7, for an entire year. The edge of the observable universe is 46 billion lightyears away. Even if we somehow managed to master lightspeed travel, we could spend the equivalent of our entire human civilization up to now zooming across the cosmos and we’d have barely scratched the surface. In fact, it would be more accurate to stay we explored 0% of the universe than 1%.

I get the feeling of astrophe, man. It’s almost maddening to know that 100% of the universe will be forever out of our reach.