What would it take to go to Andromeda?

Andromeda is the largest galaxy in the local group, which includes the Milky Way galaxy. It appears as a small cloudy smudge in the constellation of Andromeda (of course). It's also known as M=31, a Messier nebula object. The fact that it is another galaxy wasn't known until the 1920's when Hubble found that it contained stars that were outside our galaxy. Now, we know that it's around 2.5 million light years away from us and that it has 1 trillion stars and is 260,000 light years across. We also know that it's approaching the Milky Way galaxy at 110 kilometers per second, which means that it will collide with our galaxy in 4 billion years. I wonder if there's some way we could get out of the way!

What does all this mean? Nothing! We won't be around when it happens. The reason that I brought this up is to emphasize the immense distances that we would have to travel to get to the Andromeda galaxy. Even if we could go the speed of light, it would take 2.5 million years to get there. Even if we could go at warp 10, it would still take 250,000 years. That's a long time! I think we'll have to find a wormhole to get there.

Let's say we could get there, what would we find? That's a good question. The light that comes from the Andromeda galaxy that we see now started out 2.5 million years ago. Maybe Homo habilus, the species that Lucy belongs to, was around then. But, they definitely had no idea what the stars were or what anything else in the sky was. We Homo sapiens have only been around maybe 200,000 years at best. That's a drop in the bucket of time. This only demonstrates how difficult it is to formulate a model for the universe at it exists now.

Everything we see in the sky is ancient or certainly old. It's like looking at old photographs and wondering what the people and houses would look like now.
All we can talk about is what we see now. For one, we see that Andromeda is a nice spiral galaxy that some believe is barred like the Milky Way. This means that it has a bar that goes through the middle. The view that we can see shows Andromeda to be inclined 77 degrees. This is almost on edge (it would be 90 degrees if that were the case). As with our galaxy, Andromeda is spinning at an average velocity of 225 kilometers per second. We also see that it has about 7 arms separated from one another by 13,000 light years. Andromeda also has a supermassive black hole in it's center; although, it's difficult to determine its true nature because the center also contains a dense star cluster. An estimate of the size of the supermassive black hole there is 1 to 2 trillion times the mass of our Sun.

Andromeda also has satellite galaxies, 14 in all. Our Milky Way has a similar amount. These are left over from the original galaxy formations, which means that there have been galaxy collisions in the past. Supposedly, Triangulum (the other larger galaxy in the local group) came very close to Andromeda 2 to 4 billion years ago, which according to theory caused a lot of star formation in Andromeda.

For some strange reason star formation and supernovae are more numerous in the Milky Way Galaxy compared to Andromeda. This indicates that the star population in Andromeda is older than in the Milky Way. Does this mean that there are more alien civilizations there?

My speculation is that there are more intelligent alien races in the Andromeda galaxy than there is in our galaxy. If that were the case, then we'll never know because a radio signal from that far away would be useless in determining if it's from an intelligent species. I guess if we really want to know, we'll have to go there. Bon Voyage!

Thanks for reading.