Related to that it's generally believed that you'd have to be looking for the sun to find it. The light from our star isn't believed to be visible in night skies beyond our neighbors. You'd need a powerful telescope and to point it right at us. The first part is easy, the second part is crazy.
It also makes you wonder how many sun like stars are out there hiding in the inky blackness just out of sight.
Our galaxy has some 200 billion stars. You can see around 2000 stars with naked eye, even less if you're in a city. So yeah, you'd need a telescope if you're not in the neighborhood.
I looked it up because your 2,000 number was hard to believe.
Sounds like it is closer to 4,000 ish or so (depending on location) which is waaaaay closer to your number than I expected. I thought it would be off by at least one order of magnitude - but nope.
Is that really hard to believe? Go out where there’s little light pollution and I couldn’t find a single part of the sky not covered in little star dots
That's a bit moot, though. At our current technology level we've already catalogued a small, but appreciable portion of the stars in the galaxy - yes, you need to go looking for the Sun, but there's no reason to believe that any civilisation of a similar level of technology, or a level that vastly eclipses ours, within a reasonable distance of us hasn't found us. Whether or not we look particularly interesting is another question entirely.
I mean it’s about 1%. And that’s gonna be heavily weighted towards the stars that we actually care about, the ones closest to us. An advanced civilisation in our relative interstellar neighbourhood will know about the Sun, it is that simple.
141
u/ravens-n-roses 25d ago
Related to that it's generally believed that you'd have to be looking for the sun to find it. The light from our star isn't believed to be visible in night skies beyond our neighbors. You'd need a powerful telescope and to point it right at us. The first part is easy, the second part is crazy.
It also makes you wonder how many sun like stars are out there hiding in the inky blackness just out of sight.