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“Space is absurdly large,” he added, picking up a tiny speck of dust between his fingers and holding it up, examining it in the morning light, somewhat lost in thought. “If this was the sun … Well, actually, even this is a bit too big. If our sun was a single blood cell, visible only under a microscope, then our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of the Continental US.”

“And the nearest star?” Lily asked.

Jason looked out the window of the restaurant and across the street at Central Park. From their first floor booth, he could see over the tops of the trees. There were some kids throwing a frisbee in an open grassy patch by the lake.

“About there,” he replied, pointing at them. “Roughly two hundred yards away, perhaps a little more. And it too would be no more than a microscopic speck of dust.”

“What about Voyager?” Mitchell asked. “It’s left the solar system and is headed toward the stars, right?”

“Well, yes and no,” Jason replied. “It all depends on how you define the solar system.”

Jason pulled a quarter out and put it on the table in front of him, with his finger resting in the middle of the coin.

“If the sun was the size of a blood cell, most of the planets, including Earth, would orbit inside this quarter. Voyager would be just marginally beyond our quarter. Voyager is beyond the most distant, recognized planet, and well beyond the heliopause, where solar winds buffet against interstellar space, but it’s not really the edge of our solar system, not if you consider the solar system as the system directly affected by the sun.”

Jason pointed across the street at a man walking his dog through the park, just visible through the trees. He’d only just walked his beagle across the street.

“He’s probably at about the right distance. Surrounding our sun almost a light year away is the Oort cloud containing billions, if not trillions of comets all held loosely in check by the sun’s gravity, just waiting to start their long slow fall in toward the inner solar system and put on a show. That’s the real edge of the solar system, at least from a gravitational perspective.”

Lily had stopped eating. She sat there with her elbows on the table, her head resting on her hands, listening with rapt attention.

“Space is mindbogglingly huge. There’s a whole lot of nothing out there. Imagine New York City as an empty void. You’d have maybe a couple of hundred microscopic specks of dust scattered around as stars. Perhaps one of them would be on top of the Empire State Building, another might be on the Statue of Liberty, and so on. But there would only be a couple of hundred tiny specks broadly scattered around the place.

“If the Milky Way were the size of the Continental US, there would be a massive black hole at the center, just outside of Lebanon, Kansas, up by the border with Nebraska. But it too would be no larger than a few grains of sand. As for us, the tiny speck we call the sun would probably be in St. Louis.”

“I like St. Louis,” Helena said, grinning as she sipped some coffee.

“Black holes in Kansas!” Mitchell cried. “Sounds like you’ve been reading News of the World.”

Jason laughed, saying, “There’s just too much empty space out there. Interstellar travel is impractical. It will take Voyager 30,000 years just to reach the Oort cloud, let alone any of the stars. Thirty to forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens had just reached Europe and discovered Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man. Imagine where we will be in thirty thousand years time!

“One day we’ll travel to the stars, and that will be the greatest act of exploration ever undertaken, but make no mistake about it, we’re traversing an arid desert, a desolate Arctic wilderness, an oxygen-starved mountain far more dangerous and inhospitable than Everest. The distances involved and the difficulty of maintaining life in outer space should not be underestimated.”

Helena seemed more interested than Mitchell, saying, “But we’ve been traveling into space for decades. We’ve been to the Moon. We’ve got a space station.”

“Honestly,” Jason replied. “That’s like playing in a duck pond, never being more than an arm’s length from shore. If space travel was swimming, we’d be comfortable in a kiddie pool. Getting to the Moon would be like swimming a few lengths in an Olympic size pool, while traveling to Mars compares to swimming from Cuba to Florida. Going to another star, well, now you’re taking on a distance that makes crossing the Pacific look like your kiddie pool.”

Mitchell disagreed, saying, “And just because we haven’t done it, you think no one can? That makes no sense. There’s no reason to think aliens would be at the same technological level as us. They could be millions of years more advanced.”

“Or billions of years behind us,” Jason added.

“So you don’t believe in aliens?” Lily asked.

“Oh, it’s not that I don’t think there are aliens. I just don’t think they’re surreptitiously visiting Earth every couple of years to probe the rectums of a select few rednecks.