Say you were Captain of the starship USS Enterprise on a five year mission of exploration, and on the average you flew around Warp 6 or 392 times the speed of light – about a light year per day. In our neck of the woods stars average about 5 light years apart, so on the average, you could visit a star a week – five days travel time, two days there – or around 250 stars total during your expedition. Quite a career in either a television series or Starfleet – but hardly the merest scratch in exploring the Milky Way Galaxy, which is a disk 100,000 light years in diameter and 1,000 light years thick containing 200,000,000,000+ stars. Even the bubble of space around our Sun is loaded with stars. As cataloged by the real-life 1990s Hipparcos mission, there are over 120,000 within 450 light years of Earth – within a year or so of crusing distance for a 24th Century Star Trek Federation vessel. Of those, 17,129 may have habitable “M-Class” planets. That precise number is what astronomers Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull came up with in the preparation of their newly-released HabCat, or Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems. (The rest of the stars probably have planets too, of which we’ve already discovered over a hundred – but not habitable ones). For now, we’ll use Tarter and Turnbull’s list to guide future searches for alien radio signals. Maybe someday, their work will be a list of ports of call for a starship – or a fleet of them.