You will never meet an alien.
I was rewatching Doctor Who with my kids, teaching them important culture, and for a number of reasons that matter to me but not you, I felt lonely. And I had a realisation:
I will never meet an alien, and neither will you.
Not because they don’t exist. Statistically, they almost certainly do. The universe contains roughly 2 trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those stars have planets. Some of those planets have conditions for life.
The numbers say we’re not alone.
But we will never meet them. It’s not a matter of technological advancement or lifespan. Physics itself forbids it.
The universe is structured, at a fundamental level, to keep us apart.
Let me explain.
The Eight-Minute Delay
Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second. That sounds really, really fast. It’s not.
The light from the Sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.
This means when you look at the Sun, you’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago. If the Sun exploded 7 minutes ago, you wouldn’t know yet. You’d still see it shining in the sky. You’d still feel its warmth on your face, the Earth would still be orbiting a Sun that disappeared. For 7 whole minutes, you’d be living in a reality that no longer exists.
Nothing, not information, not matter, not anything, can travel faster than light. This is a fundamental law of physics. You can’t send a message faster than light. That means you can’t know what’s happening “now” anywhere.
If the sun exploded 7 minutes ago, there would be no way for anyone to know yet. It’s not that we’re not looking at the right spot. It would just be impossible to know.
The universe has a speed limit. And that speed limit means you’re always looking at the past.
The Conversation That Takes a Childhood
The nearest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years away.
If you manage to see it at night, you’re seeing it as it was 4.24 years ago. For all we know, it might not exist anymore. You’re looking at a potential star ghost.
Imagine there’s a civilisation on a planet orbiting that star. They’re our closest possible neighbours in the universe.
If they sent us a message today, travelling at the speed of light, we would receive it in 4.24 years.
If we replied immediately, they would receive our response 4.24 years after that.
One round trip of communication: 8.5 years.
Think about what that means. If you started a conversation with them the day you were born, and they replied to every message immediately, you would be 8 and a half years old before you received their first response. You’d be 17 before their second message arrived.
A short, two-sentence conversation would last your whole childhood.
And Proxima Centauri is our nearest neighbour. The next-closest stars are 6 light-years away. 10 light-years. 50 light-years. Most stars in our galaxy are thousands of light-years away.
A civilisation 1,000 light-years away? You send them a message, they get it in 1,000 years. If they reply immediately, you get their response in another 1,000 years. That’s the whole history of Christianity for one exchange.
By the time they received your message, everyone who sent it would be dead. Their great-great-great-grandchildren would be dead. By the time the response arrived, the civilisation that sent the original message might not even exist anymore.
To receive their response now, you needed a means of sending that message around the time Jesus was around.
The Expansion
But wait, there’s more, and it’s not good.
The universe is expanding. Not into something: space itself is growing, stretching, pulling galaxies apart.
The Andromeda galaxy is our nearest large galactic neighbour, and it is 2.5 million light-years away. The light hitting your eye tonight left that galaxy 2.5 million years ago, before humans existed. Before Homo erectus existed. Before stone tools.
Andromeda is the closest. There are galaxies billions of light-years away. The light from those galaxies has been travelling toward us for billions of years, longer than Earth has existed.
And beyond a certain distance, the expansion of space is faster than the speed of light.
This means there are parts of the universe we will never see. Not “haven’t seen yet.” Can never see. The light will never reach us. Even if we waited forever.
There are civilisations out there (statistically there must be) that we are causally disconnected from. We exist in the same universe, in the same moment of cosmic time, but we can never affect each other. We can never send a signal. We can never know about each other.
The universe contains them, and us, and has structured itself so we can never meet.
The Paradox
You are made of atoms. Those atoms came from stars. Stars that lived and died billions of years ago, exploding and scattering their guts across space. Eventually some of that stardust clumped together into planets. And eventually, on at least one planet, that stardust arranged itself into you.
You are literally made of the universe. You ARE the universe. There’s no separation between “you” and “it.” Every atom in your body was forged in a stellar furnace.
And yet the universe - the thing you’re made of - has arranged the laws of physics so that most of itself can never touch most of itself.
It structured reality so that connection is nearly impossible.
The Real Loneliness
That’s not even the lonely part.
The lonely part is that we’re lonely here.
On a planet with 8 billion other humans, made of the same atoms, breathing the same air, living the same handful of years in the same tiny sliver of cosmic time.
You don’t need to travel 4 light-years to feel distant from someone. You can feel distant from your best friend, right here on Earth, yet so far away.
The light-years, the expansion, the speed limit, that’s just a metaphor. The universe is showing you, in the starkest possible terms, what loneliness looks like at scale.
But the loneliness you feel? That’s here. That’s now. That’s between people who share the same planet, the same moment, the same improbable arrangement of atoms that can think and feel and reach for each other, and yet they don’t.
The Reaching
Despite the speed limit, despite the expansion, despite the fundamental isolation built into the fabric of reality, we build telescopes to see galaxies we’ll never visit. We send messages into space that might never be received. We search for signals from civilisations that might not exist, or might have died out millennia before their message arrives.
We reach across distances we can never cross, toward connections we can never make.
And here, on this tiny rock, where connection is actually possible, where you’re not separated by light-years and causally disconnected by the expansion of space, we should reach for each other too.
Sometimes we reconnect, sometimes we don’t. But at least we tried to reach out.
The universe spent 13.8 billion years arranging atoms so that they could feel lonely. And then, absurdly, arranged them so they could reach for each other anyway.
You are a temporary pattern of ancient stardust. You will persist for a blink of an eye before disassembling back into the universe. You are cosmically, fundamentally isolated from civilisations light-years away and from the person you lost or never met.
And you reach out anyway.
That’s the absurd part. That’s the wonderful part.
Your brain can’t hold the universe. The distances are too vast, the timescales too long, the isolation too complete.
But you reach out anyway.
And sometimes, against all odds, you touch.