You’ve seen it in every sci-fi movie—the alien ship warping through galaxies, or some advanced species reaching Earth after decoding our radio signals. We imagine they’re out there, watching. Waiting.
But what if they can’t reach us?
Not because they don’t want to.
But because they never could.
The Illusion of Closeness
Look up at the stars on a clear night—what you’re seeing isn’t now. You’re staring into the past. Light from those stars has traveled for tens, hundreds, even thousands of years just to reach your eyes.
And that’s just light.
Matter, ships, signals—these move far slower.
We imagine galaxies like islands on a map, each one a short flight away with the right fuel or engine. But space doesn’t work that way. It stretches. Expands. And that expansion isn’t constant—it’s accelerating.
Enter: The Cosmic River
Imagine standing on the edge of a powerful river, tossing a message in a bottle toward the opposite bank. But the river’s current keeps speeding up. Your bottle drifts farther and farther downstream, never reaching the other side.
That’s our universe.
The farther away something is, the faster it’s receding—not from movement, but from space itself expanding between you and it.
There are points in this universe, not all that far away, where galaxies are receding faster than light. Not because they’re moving faster than light—but because the space between us is growing at a rate that light itself can’t overcome.
So Where Are They?
They might exist. They might have thrived, evolved, built wonders beyond our comprehension.
But we’ll never hear from them.
And they’ll never hear from us.
Because the cosmic current has already pulled us too far apart.
The tragedy isn’t that we’re alone.
It’s that we might be surrounded by voices we’ll never hear.
What Does That Mean for Us?
Maybe we’re not meant to look outward forever. Maybe our search should turn inward—into the atoms, into the mind, into the myths we carry that hint at forgotten truths.
Maybe the real contact… already happened.