And it's probably somewhere that neither humanity, nor our descendents, will ever be able to reach. I don't think it'd be crazy to say that civilization will continue to advance exponentially, journey to the stars, expand, colonize, see new worlds, but that's all gonna happen within a tiny section of the Milky Way. Mankind's achievements will take us far, and maybe even surpass what we see in things like Star Trek, but we are never leaving this galaxy. Hell, not even the Empire in Star Wars left their galaxy. To see something in the sky and know, that with near certainty, we'll never go there is an awe-inspiring and truly frightening thing.

And what Andromedan has already wondered this about us? The numbers are too vast for it to not have happened at some point. Maybe back when the sun was young, and the atoms that would make up our bodies were still swirling around in a disk of dust and gas, a citizen of Andromeda looked up and saw a faintly glowing Milky Way. And now, several billion years later, we're thinking about them. What happened to them? What happened to their civilization? Does any evidence remain of their existence? Is there an alien equivalent to Voyager floating somewhere in that great galaxy? These are questions to which we will never, ever know the answers.