Colonizing the Milky Way is an unfathomable task for us mere Earthlings, but for an extraterrestrial civilization capable of hopping from one star system to the next, it’s shockingly doable.

Based on reasonable technological constraints, the Researchers suggest it would take an ambitious alien race about one billion years to Conquer and colonize the entire inner portion of the Galaxy, according to research published in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. That may seem comically long, but the researchers told Gizmodo that it’s not that bad compared to how long the galaxy has been sitting around, just waiting to be conquered. read more here.