[TXnMA]

"There are, by count, about 52 million galaxies in that image ..."

Yep. And each one composed of billions to trillions of stars!

I probably still have the URL somewhere, but after the first, amazing "HDF" peek, someone produced a great video titled,"The Most Important Image Ever Made". And -- the HDF most certainly was...

The various Hubble Deep Fields literally opened the eyes of all humankind (if they will but look) to the unimaginable majesty and power of the Creator of our Universe -- and, to our own relative insignificance in it.

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Yet, there are still some Earth-critters who think that burning parked garbage trucks in the streets makes them "powerful"...

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The unimaginable number of stars makes the probability of life somewhere "out there" statistically likely. But, the distances involved make it near-zero probable that we will ever encounter other intelligent beings.

Maybe that's a good thing.

Because -- based on present evidence -- the probability that their intellects would dwarf ours is embarrassingly high...

TXnMA   
  

[PIF]

Also a statistical fact - each star has at least one planet. So in out galaxy that would be about 300,000,000 planets at the minium. As for the distance thing - just imagine you had one of the very rare copies of “Dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field” and were well versed in theoretical physics.

Would you conclude as Oliver Heaviside did that James Clerk Maxwell’s 200 quaternions were garbage and only four really could be converted into vector equations?

Or would you actually study them as they are and conclude as Nicola Tesla and Albert Einstein did that there was a lot more there? That there is no such thing as distance, since it is possible to step from any one point in the universe to any other point instantaneously?

If you were an Alien from some other star and not bound by our Earth cultural norms and consensus thinking, might you just make something with that knowledge so you could travel anywhere in the Universe?

But then you aren’t an Alien, and so would you fall back and support Heaviside’s trashing of 196 of the quaternions and reworking four of the quaternions into everything we now know about the entire electromagnetic spectrum?

The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose - J. B. S. Haldane.

or

“We are so far beyond all things Star Trek, that what we have is not only 50 years beyond what anyone imagines, but 50 years beyond what anyone CAN imagine - Kelly Johnson