You know those pictures of a spiral galaxy that say "you are here?" pointing to the outer edge. You actually aren't. That's not our galaxy, we don't have pictu

You know those pictures of a spiral galaxy that say "you are here?" pointing to the outer edge. You actually aren't. That's not our galaxy, we don't have pictures like that of our actual galaxy and don't have any idea how to get one. Also there's tons of other fundamental limits - galaxies that will likely forever be just faint pixels, the distribution of photons being too dispersed for any detector. Also there's the light horizon problem - we can only see to what the age of the universe allows, not necessarily to its extent. Beyond that let's say there's a 100% confidence of methane on a planet around one of the Alpha Centauri stars, say Proxima Centari B, a pretty solid indicator of life. Ok now what? Probes like Voyager would take 75,000 years to get there. If we had loaded a ship with neanderthals during paleolithic times, their descendants would just be arriving now. Even the much touted solar sails would take 25 years to get there and 4 years to send back any data. If magically launched tomorrow, it'd be 2052 before first byte. The distance is really wildly insurmountable and that's just our next door neighbor. If I could time travel say, 25,000 years hence and we somehow had not blown ourselves up, I could imagine even then asking "how much of space have you explored" and getting an answer like "well, the milky way is 100,000,000,000 stars and 100,000 light years across so about 0.001% of that." There's ballpark a trillion galaxies btw. At some point, the numbers become meaninglessly large, might as well just call it a zillion.