How Many Galaxies have we explored?

Question

I'm a writer trying to create a fictional universe for my stories. I would like to know how many galaxies have been explored enough to say there is no life on them. (I know there is at least one.)

Answer 1

1

Answer 2

We have not even studied one galaxy in detail yet (including ours, The Milky Way). In actual fact we have *not* studied our Solar System in very good detail yet. There are countless moons, comets, asteroids etc which have not been viewed in good detail. There is not one good photo available of Pluto yet though that will change in a few years time when a NASA probe does a fly by. The Jovian moon, Europa is widely believed by mainstream science to have a liquid ocean under an icy crust but nothing has broke through the ice to have a look. Despite all the machines sent in orbit or to land on Mars the actual percentage of the planet's rocks/sand/ice studied in good detail including under the surface is so fractional it would be way less then 0.001%.

We still have a long way to go...

Answer 3

The only galaxy we have explored in detail is our own. Other galaxies are simply too far away for us to explore right now. We haven't even gone much outside our own solar system right now with a probe. The Hubble telescope has done the most work when it comes to taking photos of extra-stellar planets and stars. Out of all there is to know about our galaxy, we know very little. A galaxy is a huge place... we'd be lucky to probe a small percentage of it.

Answer 4

Physically.  Just ours.  And even that is an incredibly small percentage of it's make up.  All the galaxies that do not belong to the Milky Way, have only been observed through distant observations.  And the distance from us are so vast, that, even if life did exist on them, and it were detectable, that life would have had to have existed millions of years ago and have been transmitting something at the speed of light at that time for us to detect it.  

For fiction writing, I would suggest keeping your universe limited to just one galaxy.  Well, it can have all of them, but to have your characters hop from one to the next would infer a technology that we currently would consider unimaginable.

Answer 5

In fiction you can change what is already known; you can say there IS life on Mars and that we have regular congress with them, you can say NASA developed starfaring ships for exploring the galaxy at faster than light speeds(like Star trek), you can say humans mate with aliens on a regular basis. It doesn't have to be very realistic, but throwing in the name of a real star now and then, like Alpha Centauri for example, doesn't hurt.

Answer 6

zero! we haven't even explored ours enough yet to say for sure that there is no other life in the Milky Way galaxy.

Answer 7

None.

We have only sent one or two small "satellites" outside of Solar System. So far, they have gotten nowhere important.  It will be several thousands of years before they get to any other star.  We haven't even begun to explore galaxies.

At best, we've LOOKED at them.  But even our best telescopes can't actualyl SEE another planet, so there is no real proof that other planets exist.  What we call "proof" is based on "star wobble", a variation in gravity casued by two VERY LARGE objects, one orbiting the other -- like a hughe gas planet orbitng a star.  But we have never actualyl SEEN the gas giant.

And the distances between galaxies is so unbelievably HUGE that we will probably never go to another galaxy.  There are just too many physical limits on speed and time.  Only if Star Trek comes through with Warp Drive will we even be able to consider inter-galactic travelk.

Even in our OWN galaxy (The Milky Way) the distance are so huge as to be almost un-understandable.  It's 4.5 light years to the next closest star (Alpha Centauri).  That's almost 6 TRIILION miles.  At todays capabilites, it would take several lifetimes to reach the next star -- so go look up "GENERATION SHIP" and "STASIS FIELD" -- neither of which has been invented yet.

So far as exploring for life goes, we have only just barely begun on ONE other planet (Mars), and men have set foot on only ONE other "heavenly body" (The Moon).  So far, out search of other life had only find very tiny amounts of water on Mars -- nothing else, nowhere else.

[it occurs to me that maybe you don't know the difference between a galaxy, a solar system, and a planet . . . .?]

Answer 8

We haven't explored any galaxies, not even our own one. The only part of the cosmos that we have explored is our own solar system.

Answer 9

If you're going to write science fiction stories and get them published, you need to brush up on your knowledge of the cosmos. First of all, the furthest any humans have travelled is the moon i.e. not far at all. Secondly, no unmanned probe has even left our solar system, let alone explored another star system. Thirdly, you appear to be confused over the term "galaxy". A galaxy is an often vast "city" containing millions to trillions of stars. Our own galaxy is called the Milky Way and is around 100,000 light years in diameter - it's huge. Our sun is but one star of 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way. The nearest large galaxy to ours is Andromeda, at 2.5 million light years.

Even in sci-fi series such as Star Trek, they have only explored a small fraction of our galaxy. They have been to other galaxies on the rare occasion, but only by accident.  

Answer 10

None. We haven't even explored our own solar system's planets, let alone any stars beyond our own. Galaxies contain billions of stars and there are billions of galaxies in the universe. Our galaxy (the milky way) is 100 light years across and the nearest star to us is about 4 1/2 light years from here. your concept of galaxies and our place in them needs to be re-evaluated and thought through.

Answer 11

We have not explored any galaxies except through a telescope. An through a telescope you cannot determine much, and certainly NOT wether life exists or not