Anybody out There?

MOST CERTAINLY, YES.

There's nothing like the infinite night sky to make you feel small. The next time you're night driving through Death Valley, the Moab or Cherry Springs, take the time to look up. Your problems will instantly seem a lot less perilous. Observe the immense beauty of our home galaxy and realize that it's a mere 100,000 light years in diameter.

Here are the numbers: There are an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, the nearest being Proxima Centauri, a nice little red dwarf 4.22 light years away. A spacecraft traveling at the current height of human capabilities would take 78,000 years to arrive. Even more mind boggling; it would take over a billion years for the same craft to completely clear the Milky Way galaxy; and incidentally, there are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Yes, you are small.