I agree with everything you said, though there’s also a time dimension to it. Humanity could be a relative latecomer to the galaxy/universe, since we weren’t t

I agree with everything you said, though there’s also a time dimension to it. Humanity could be a relative latecomer to the galaxy/universe, since we weren’t the first species to evolve on earth. The dinosaurs were first, something like 300 million years ago, went extinct ~65 million years ago, then humanity evolved a few million years ago. Assume there’s at least one other planet, say in the Milky Way, that evolved life at roughly the same time as Earth, except its first major species was intelligent. They would have a 300 million year head start on humanity. Whatever science and tech they developed in that time would be far beyond what we can currently even imagine. Crossing the vast distances would likely be more viable for such an advanced species. There’s probably some statistical distribution, Normal or otherwise, governing the odds of emergence of intelligent life on any given planet capable of supporting life. Most such planets may never evolve intelligent life, or may take more than two tries for it. Earth and Humanity may even be somewhere far to the right of the mean and median. But if even just a few planets are further to the right of Earth, then you could end up with those species having hundreds of millions of years of a head start vs humanity in their evolution and development.