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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5277885" data-attributes="member: 177">The closest known planet outside our solar system is 10.5 light years away.  There's only a handful of starts under 10 LY from Earth.The other known planets outside our solar system are mostly less than 300 light years away, not greater than.  That's just because finding planets is harder the farther away the star is, so they've been concentrating on nearby stars in the search.The first *direct* image of a planet around another star using visible light was taken in 2008, and only confirmed in this past June.<a href="http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/first-alien-planet-photographed-confirmed-100629.html" target="_blank">SPACE.com -- First Direct Photo of Alien Planet Finally Confirmed</a> The Earth takes about 200 to 250 million years to make an orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Civilization is only about 10,000 years old.  In terms of moving around the galaxy, the Earth has gone next to nowhere since civilization began.I think you may not quite grasp the scale here.The chance that the Earth will get hit by an object from outside the solar system is, for all practical purposes, zero.  Space is big.  Really big.  Really vastly empty big.  There's only a handful of stars within ten light years of Earth now, and that's only going to change on the order of millions of years, not thousands.  For our purposes, there is nothing out there to hit us, and we are such a tiny target that hitting us is nigh impossible.Now, getting hit by a rock that's already within our own solar system?  That we can show has happened rather frequently in the past, so that it is likely to happen again.</blockquote>

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