If they’re from this galaxy, they’re neighbors, not aliens. They’re fellow residents of the same spiraling, star‑strewn province. Once you grasp how impossibly vast the universe truly is, the whole idea of “alien” expands beyond our locality.
Everything that thinks, moves, or dreams under this same galactic canopy is already close to us by cosmic standards. We’re all drifting together inside one luminous whirlpool of stars, sharing the same gravitational address. That’s kinship, whether we recognize the faces or not.
And if you want to talk about actual outsiders—creatures you could fairly call “alien”—you have to look far beyond our spiral home. The next nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light‑years away. That’s where the true strangers would be. Anything born in the Milky Way is a neighbor; anything from there is foreign in a way our language barely has room for.
I do wonder, though, whether our neighbors in this cosmic cul-de-sac are going to let us join the Galactic Federation once they find out we named it after a candy bar.