Space is Big

Space is big.
You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts compared to space.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

He was right, too. The picture above was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and zooms in on a tiny tiny patch of sky that astronomers used to think was really uninteresting. What it shows us is just how much stuff is really out there. it looks like a lot of stars, but only one of the blobs of light is actually a star (the bluish one in the middle). All of the rest of the objects in the picture are galaxies, giant island universes made from billions of stars, all with their own planetary sytems, nebulae, black holes and so on. And in just this one picture of the smallest part of the night sky imaginable, we can count hundreds or even thousands of them.
Does anybody live out there? We may never know, but as Jodie Foster says in the film Contact,

The universe is a pretty big place. So if it's just us . . . it seems like an awful waste of space.