Space Stage

So I've been playing this game Spore lately. I've played it before and basically beat it, but I for whatever reason got the urge to play it again. In the game you evolve from a simple single celled organism, through all the steps of evolution from Cell Stage to Creature Stage to Tribal Stage to Civilization Stage to Space Stage. Once you get to the Space Stage, it's pretty amazing how big it is. The creators created I think somewhere around a million or more individual stars in the galaxy for you to explore, each with one to several planets to inhabit, and there are hundreds if not thousands of different species, created both by the creators and by players, who you interact with. 

Anyway... all this playing a space game got me to thinking about space and how we are just barely hardly even scratching the surface of space travel and the "final frontier", which I think is a misnomer, but that's for another topic. Like, comparing it to other civilizations in the past.... in terms of space, we're lower than the south pacific islanders riding around in little canoes. No, we have just come up with the idea for a canoe have have only recently started to try to make canoes and test them  like 10 feet off the coast. That's basically how far we are in space travel and technology. 

Though I did some research and one thing about our development, when compared to the rest of human history, is absolutely amazing. That is that ever since around 1971, human beings have been living consistently in space. Right now, as I'm writing this, and every day of your life when you're going to school and work and hanging out with friends, etc. there are a handful of men and women living and working in space, circling the Earth I think about 15 times every 24 hours. It's amazing ... if someone asked you to name all the types of environments people live in, you'd have to say ... deserts, mountains, forests, plains ... and space.

We may only be in a canoe ten feet off the coast, but damn it all if that still isn't amazing.

Some thoughts on alien life...

Our galaxy, which we call the Milky Way Galaxy has approximately 400 billion stars it. Currently after only viewing less than 10% of the visible universe, we have identified about 3,000 galaxies. Estimates are that in the entire universe there are around 125 billion galaxies.So, averaging 400 billion stars per galaxy, at 125 billion galaxies, that means we can estimate there are 50,000 billion billion or 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the entire universe. To say we are anywhere near alone in the universe is probably the absolute dumbest thing anyone could ever say.

As for alien life that's intelligent and can navigate the stars and galaxy and universe, well let's think here...
Aside from the millions of UFO sightings worldwide and the fact that people from military grunts to PhD's to world leaders have admitted to either seeing or working with UFO's and aliens.... we can make an educated guess as to whether or not there are aliens at our level or higher out there. Scientists used to say that it's impossible for aliens to visit us because stars are just too far apart. Now they admit there are ways to get around that, but that we don't have the ability to do so yet. However, our star is young compared to others. The binary stars Zeta Reticuli 1 & 2 for example are about twice the age of Sun. Assuming there is life in that system as well and it followed a similar developmental path to ours, do the math and you can guess that they have been around for 500,000 years to our 300,000, do the math again and you can figure their move from nomadic tribal peoples without language, science, etc. to a "civilzation" began 10,000 years ago to our 6,000. Meaning they have about a 4,000 year head start on us. Imagine our world in the year 6009 instead of 2009. Wouldn't you expect us to have the ability to travel to other planets, have anti gravity, all the star trek/star wars thing and more by then? If so, then why think others, who have been around longer can't already?