Cosmos

I stumbled upon this picture on Twitter.

James Webb's deep space image

It looks ordinary, just like the other outer space picture. But if you zoom in and see those tiny dots here and there, they are galaxies—lots of them. And I started muttering while looking at the picture, "We can't be the only one in the universe—we just can't!"

You do realize that one galaxy can contain thousands upon thousands of planets. Thousands. Take a look at our Milky Way, for example. Our beloved Milky Way has approximately 100 billion planets; there could be a minimum of 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth and 3,916 solar systems in our Milky Way. These numbers are coming from one galaxy, ours. 

Space.com estimated that there are between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Again, in the observable universe. Imagine how many planets there are in this observable universe. We know that the universe is a mind-boggling gigantic space, and up until now, we haven't gotten an exact measurement of how big it actually is. It could be infinite.

Back to the above picture.

The eight-sided features are stars, and the rest are galaxies. You can see how many galaxies are in that picture; even the tiniest dots are galaxies. But let's have a moment to really comprehend that inside those galaxies are billions of planets. Then, multiply that by the total galaxies inside that picture to get the rough numbers of the total planets. And those rough numbers are just from a small picture taken by James Webb's deep space image.  

My mind can't grasp the idea that we are the only beings in this vast universe, with so many planets, solar systems, and galaxies. We can't be the only ones here; it seems impossible. It's a waste of enormous space if we are the only ones here. And imagine the possibilities—they could be endless. It sounds so isolating to say that we are the only ones here, floating by ourselves on this tiny blue planet surrounded by darkness.

Yeah, no. I still reject the statement that we are the only beings in this immense universe. There should be someone out there.