25,000 light years to Galactic Center, or 25,000 light years to the outer rim.
We aren’t even on a MAJOR arm of the Milky Way.
As the link up there noted though, the Milky Way isn’t even particularly significant, Andromeda is twice the size.
So any advanced race would a) have to be capable of getting here and b) have some reason to do so.
Think about Easter Island, no contact with the West until 1722. If you had asked them if they had heard about the great empires, England, France or Spain, the reaction would have been “Well, they haven’t come here…”
The inner parts of the Milky Way (or any galaxy for that matter) is more, um, illuminated with hard radiation and cosmic rays than way out here in the 'Burbs of the Western Spiral Arm.
Fair chance biological life didn’t get much farther than something similar to Earth’s Giant Tube Worms for all that radiation.
The thing people forget is that, yeah, we’re in the Milky Way, but we’re at the ASS END of the Milky Way.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/where-earth-in-milky-way
25,000 light years to Galactic Center, or 25,000 light years to the outer rim.
We aren’t even on a MAJOR arm of the Milky Way.
As the link up there noted though, the Milky Way isn’t even particularly significant, Andromeda is twice the size.
So any advanced race would a) have to be capable of getting here and b) have some reason to do so.
Think about Easter Island, no contact with the West until 1722. If you had asked them if they had heard about the great empires, England, France or Spain, the reaction would have been “Well, they haven’t come here…”
The inner parts of the Milky Way (or any galaxy for that matter) is more, um, illuminated with hard radiation and cosmic rays than way out here in the 'Burbs of the Western Spiral Arm.
Fair chance biological life didn’t get much farther than something similar to Earth’s Giant Tube Worms for all that radiation.