If we phrase it "we're permanently beyond the reach of 94% of potentially malicious alien cultures," does that help?

I wonder if this is one aspect of The Great Filter that keeps aliens from contacting each other. 6% is still a lot to work with but shaving off 19 out of 20 galaxies sure helps explain a lot.

Just to add to it:

If you decided to travel to the furthest galaxies you could reach, at some point even they will move beyond the reach of Earth as space expands. To colonize them means to exile yourself from Earth permanently.

Traveling through an infinitely expanding universe is like traveling into a permanent headwind in every direction.

Weird question I just thought of: if space is always expanding, why aren't the objects around us, even their very atoms, getting slowly torn apart? Are the forces holding them together just constantly pulling them back together? Is it just a very small amount of expansion at a human scale? Does this affect very sensitive measurements of distance?

> Are the forces holding them together just constantly pulling them back together? Is it just a very small amount of expansion at a human scale?

Both. Even our galaxy is held together by gravity that's stronger than the expansion of space on that scale.

If you can handle being 'exiled' from the past permanently, what difference does it really make?

What if we're in a simulation, and algorithmically there's a way or method that will drop you in any coordinate at any time in the universe's timeline so that you can indeed explore space, and return home for dinner? I mean it'd require a TARDIS to exist probably lol, but in a sim, why not? Of course if we're in a sim, then that's probably not part of our overall 'goal' for creation, and likely we're the only creatures created so exploration really won't satisfy us, other than total galactic conquest, but then what?

6% of galaxies ought to be enough for anybody. :)

Watching this simulated fly through of 400,000 actual galaxies blows my mind. Space is frickin huge... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw&t=31s

so there's an estimated 200 billion galaxies...still leaves us 12 billion.... I mean how greedy are we?

The last enemy to be defeated will be entropy

An interesting written SF series with similar themes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence

My point is, the physics also apply to a smaller scale.

According to this image: https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/In-enough-Ti...

When you stand next to somebody and you look at this person, through the expansion of the universe and the amount of time the light needs to travel from the surface of that person, to your eyes; means that when you see this person in the original distance, you do not see that person at the actual distance. It's not possible to share a contemporary timeline with other persons, everything is a few nano seconds delayed, you are existing in everybody else's past.

Of course practically this doesn't matter.

If this does but life doesn't, you're doing well

Yes, I'm doing well with life, kind of. I would attribute it to reading "Metaphysics: Concept and Problems" by Theodor W. Adorno

why? it was never going to matter to you. any of us here will be outliers if we even make it to orbit

Why?