the thing that gets me with these alien folks, is they always seem to presuppose some ancient advanced alien civilization, thousands or millions of years ahead of us, but they never stop to consider, what if we are ones who are thousands or millions of years ahead of the rest of the universe?

i mean, just think of it, our lowly old planet alone is nearly 4.5 billion years old, whereas the entire universe is only 13. our planet alone is over the a third the age of the entire universe! and in all that vast time, it is only just now started producing intelligent life, and that isn't even taking into account all the time it took for the stars to produce the elements that were needed in our planet to form us. realistically, we are talking like, at least 8-10 billion years to form intelligent life, at least! and we live in a 13 billion year old, or rather 23 billion years young, universe.

we don't know how long it normally takes for life to form, but considering all the prerequisite it took for us to form, for all we know, we could be an example of life forming exceptionally early. we could be some of the first big players in the universe and not know it. and why not? some one has to be "first" right? and look at our universe! we live in an astoundingly quiet place! would not the first few intelligent life forms find themselves alone, just like us? is not the quiet sky we see and the quiet sky they would see indistinguishable?

i feel like it has become popular to diminish humanity, to think of humanity as some kind of evil, monstrous force ravaging the planet, or to think of us a lowly insignificant primitives in the face of the cosmos. to be fair, i believe this attitude is is largely a backlash against the hubris of other eras, but honestly i am getting sick of it. yeah, we used to think we were the most important things in the universe, and yeah, we made a lot of really bad choices because of that kind of thinking, but that is now reason to take the opposite extreme either.