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.