Link to Hubble's Cosmic Collisions Galore!:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/image/

we will have moved on to bigger and better things

Or the sentient cockroaches will have, either way...

But it has happened again and again throughout time.

As it was explained in "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan, if we could shrink our galaxy down to the size of a quarter, the nearest galaxy would be a mere couple feet away on the table. If we shrunk our sun to the size of a quarter, the nearest star would be over 400 miles away.

Though galaxies appear too dense to inter-mesh, it's because of their grand scale that we view them as near solid objects.

There is no star visible in the night sky that is from outside the Milky Way, and there are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth.

Sagan did not believe we've been visited by inhabitants from any of those distant stars. He always attributed sightings to people who didn't understand what they were looking at. As evidence he pointed out that there is one type of person who never sees flying saucers: astronomers, and they spend their entire lives staring up into the night sky.

The only beings left to see it will be bacteria on the outer planets, if they're still warm enough to support it and my guess is that life will be tough enough for them that they won't care.

What might happen is that our sun, by then a burned out white dwarf, might get a companion star and begin the process of turning into a powerful supernova, creating all the building blocks that will form life in a new system billions of years down the long road of the universe.

The galaxy itself will just look a lot less tidy, the flat whirpool of stars that looks so beautifully orderly to us now becoming a disarrayed mess with stars going every which way, the galactic equivalent of a neighborhood with overgrown grass, car bodies and derelict appliances littering the yards.

What science doesn't yet know is if the two galaxies will sort themselves out into a larger spiral galaxy or if it will become a massive globular cluster of stars. All we can see now are galaxies in the process of colliding and we don't live long enough to see what happens later.

Looks like we picked the wrong millennium to stop sniffing glue.

All is change and transformation. Andromeda will not zap the Milky Way and make it disappear. The two galaxies will be integrated. Cool enough. I think we should make plans to move into the new neighborhood. It's inevitable. We aren't going away, we just may have to take on a new name as star clusters mingle.

Then again, if we truly want to avoid this fate, our best chance is to send audio and video of our tea-baggers, conservatives, republicans and fundamentalists. If they knew that these sorts of things existed in an otherwise ordinary galaxy, they may just decide to change course and avoid us all together.