Close Encounters? Totally Relative.
The Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our solar system formed 5 billion years ago. Which means, there could have already been 2 epochs of space traveling civilizations already.
There are 200 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. There are 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. Talk about ships passing in the distant, distant night.
I even just read a book about the future of continental shifts, and the supercontinent cycle. According to computer models, in 250 million years the continents will reunite in a supercontinent possibly known as Novo-Pangea. The debate whether this is due to the Pacific shrinking or the Atlantic closing up again rages on, but what is pretty widely accepted is that not only will we not be here, there won’t be a trace of a us left on Earth: our nuclear issue will have fissioned themselves out, same with the plastic islands in the oceans.
On Earth. That’s the key. Because even if we never make it back to the Moon, the marks the Apollo missions left will last for billions of years. The Moon is seismically dead, has no atmosphere, and doesn’t sustain enough asteroid impacts to completely wipe out Neil and Buzz’s boot tracks.
Poor Buzz. Even in a 250 million years, whatever creatures find those marks will quickly figure out he was the second one onto the surface.
