Aliens May Be Out There, But Too Distant for Contact

The Milky Way may be home to some 3,000 extraterrestrial civilizations but the vast distances between our galactic cousins will make contact extremely rare, a new study concludes.

Data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope and other observatories scouting for planets beyond the solar system indicate Earth is one of some 40 billion potentially habitable worlds  in the galaxy, with about one new life-friendly planet forming every year, astronomer Michael Garrett, head of the Dutch astronomy research foundation ASTRON, said at the International Astronomical Congress in Toronto