Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

Radio cuts 76,995.7 years from Voyager’s snail’s-pace travel time and reaches Alpha Centauri in 4.3 years. Theoretically, then, we could have had a reply to our radio messages in less than 9 years. We’ve been listening for intelligent sounds for more than 50 years, however, without hearing anything that offers even the slightest possibility that it comes from an intelligent source. There are only three other star systems in addition to Alpha Centauri with the possibility of a radio reply in less than 100 years, and then the distances mount rapidly: 260 years for a reply from Aldebaran (brightest star in Taurus), 300 years for a reply from Regulus (brightest star in Leo), over 1,000 years for a reply from Spica (brightest star in Virgo), nearly 1,600 years from the Pleiades, 6,000 from Orion, 24,000 for a reply from the Crab Nebula, etc. Do these figures inspire any reasonable hope for contact? Try putting an ad in The Wall Street Journal that would read something like this: “Needed: Fifty Trillion Dollars to Back Fantastic New Invention! Guaranteed Return of One Million Percent in only 6,000 Years! Investors contact (phone number and email address).”