As it appeared 100 million years ago. Check out all the other galaxies in the image. What a photo. Astronomy is a hobby of mine. I took this image of M 109 a few years ago with my cheap scope with a cheap CCD on my homemade tracking mount. It's a stack of many individual images through green, blue and red filters. I haven't done much recently. Have to get back into it. All the individual stars in the image are within our own galaxy I think it's amazing that from the chaos of the big bang there arose structures like these with only simple physics guiding the process. A straight bar? WTH? This guy is from about 84 million years ago when we were just rat-like creatures scurrying around eating dinosaur eggs. The cool thing about galaxies is that when you are looking at them you just know someone is looking back.
Thanks for that. What are the possibilities for intergalactic travel? I have always thought of escaping this world to another galaxy as nowadays DARKNESS is all around me. You get my drift?
It's difficult to imagine with all that out there, that there would be nothing other than us. Must be a reason we're all so far apart. Can't even fancy a guess.
Forget about other galaxies. There's so many planets in our own galaxy - hell, in our own arm spiral than we could possibly need. All we need is someone to come up with FTL travel.