This is an interesting idea, but I think I might contest this. Consider that the stars that make up our constellations can be relatively close maybe as far as a few tens of thousands of light years away, but the Milky Way is about 10 times wider than that. You also should consider that our sun isn’t an especially large or bright one. It’s a relatively average midsize star, which I imagine is underrepresented in constellations. Finally, distance in space is also distance in time, so the viewer is seeing our sun in the past. The light that you’re experiencing in your lifetime has an even smaller chance of being seen as part of that constellation. What you really mean is our star as it looked at some point in the past.
Maybe! Just keep in mind that our constellations require reasonable visibility from the background of the viewer, which I think is going to apply some selection criteria.
Damn, I just got done typing up the same idea… lol I love how humans glorify everything about us, but we’re extremely mid on the cosmic scale. Even the sun which we worshiped for thousands of years is but a calm normie, and any number of other cosmic bodies could kill us by accident from across the galaxy.
any number of other cosmic bodies could kill us by accident from across the galaxy.
Any why you should never skip your prayers to the Sun
I mean at this point I’m about hoping the sun succeeds in killing us off without going too wack, because humans are a blight on this planet.
This would almost certainly require the aliens to live very close to us, and probably see better, too. Even in perfectly dark sky (which almost no one has these days thanks to light polution), humans can only see a small fraction of the normal stars in the Milky Way.
The bright stars that make up constellations are either very close stars, or extremely bright objects like supergiants, red giants, and quazars in other galaxies and the like.
Even from Pluto, our sun starts to fade in to the background. The aliens would have to be reasonably close. If they saw well enough to spot the sun from very far, it’d still be in a field of much brighter stars from more than, say, 10% of the Milky Way’s diameter.
Mind, there are plenty of stars within that small bubble of the galaxy, but the Fermi Paradox has not been solved, yet. (though IMO it’s either early universe, dead universe, or the smart aliens realize we’re like a cosmic fire ant hill: too stupid to talk to, too dangerous to approach)