When we look at the Great Andromeda Galaxy we say that it is at a distance of 2.4 million light years. That means the light from that galaxy that we see tonight took 2.4 million years to reach us. The first species of the genus Homo is recognized as hablis — likely a distant cousin to us sapiens — and would have been wandering about south east Africa. The first Ice Age was just starting to freeze the Earth.

Time is an odd concept. From our experience we know that it only moves forward. But the Cosmos is so vast that when we look into the stars we see how it once appeared. It's like looking back in Time. If there was a counterpart to us staring up into the sky from their home in that distant galaxy, they would no longer exist today.

Galaxies are like archipelagos of suns spread out in the Cosmic ocean. Perhaps each contains at least one or more species of life considering its own cosmologies, mythologizing its own creation stories, wondering weather it is alone in the Cosmos. Our own “message in a bottle,” was attached to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft that are now at the edge of our solar system, more than 15 billion kilometers distant. Not bad for 30 years of space flight!

At present we have no evidence life like our own exists anywhere else. Maybe it does but we haven't recognized it yet. The man who created that message in a bottle, Carl Sagan, once wrote, “Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”