There are ~1.5 trillion stars in Andromeda + the Milky Way combined, so I read. Saying that they are mostly empty space seems like a way of rhetorically obscur

There are ~1.5 trillion stars in Andromeda + the Milky Way combined, so I read. Saying that they are mostly empty space seems like a way of rhetorically obscuring the common sense idea that close encounters and collisions would become more likely. Also the statistical distribution of velocities would be more heterogenous, wouldn't it? Bimodal? That ought to have some noticeable effect on dynamics. You also have, I assume, a second central black hole doing something, maybe disrupting an otherwise stable system. It's just weird to say, although it seems to be somewhat popular, that objects in space don't collide, when on the one hand, anyone can look at something like the Moon, and asteroids that look like rubble piles, and we also "listen" to much larger things colliding via LIGO, and I assume people in astronomy related threads know about the central black holes in galaxies that grew to millions of suns.