Those aliens could have then asked, similar to Parmenides: where does a star "end" for you to be able to "count" it as a separate entity? From the wiki page [1]:
> and thus despite appearances everything exists as one, giant, unchanging thing
The pre-socratics were a very interesting bunch, again, it's a social-constructed presumption to think that those possible aliens have all chosen the way of Aristotle and Platon like we did.
It's not clear where the Solar system ends, and it's not clear where a star ends. There are several criteria and they give different numbers. But they have all the same order of magnitude that is much smaller than the distance between the stars. For most orbital calculations you can take the star as a single point, and assume that the space is empty. Aliens probably had done a similar approximation and can count star easily.
Those aliens could have then asked, similar to Parmenides: where does a star "end" for you to be able to "count" it as a separate entity? From the wiki page [1]:
> and thus despite appearances everything exists as one, giant, unchanging thing
The pre-socratics were a very interesting bunch, again, it's a social-constructed presumption to think that those possible aliens have all chosen the way of Aristotle and Platon like we did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides