Some people argue that life is as commonplace as dirt in the universe.
Most of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy are concentrated in the main pinwheel, a whirlpool of stars 100,000 light years in diameter. A thin halo of stellar material, perhaps a million light years across, surrounds the pinwheel. Hovering out in this galactic backwater are mini-galaxies, called globular clusters. Astronomers have identified about 125 globulars. The best one visible from our latitude is certainly M13 in the constellation Hercules.