Floating far away from the music, the lights, the smells, and the grit of a solar system, it's like living in the galactic countryside. a few farmers houses, vast open ranges of grains, simplicity in every direction as far as the eye can see. Wind is pretty much the only thing you share, like in the interstellar space between our star and the other stars in our galaxy... a few hydrogen and helium atoms floating around, whizzing past, on their own journeys.
I imagine my mother listening to Michael Jackson songs on YouTube at full volume, connected to the internet, simultaneously reading emails and taking calls, feeding the cat.... and I imagine myself in our vast, dark backyard, out in the dewy midnight grass, staring at the glowing window, hearing the distant thud of "Billie Jean's not my lover"... but surrounded immediately by a lack of sensory input. The grass itself, is far more sensory input than you'd experience floating out in the raw emptiness of interstellar space... and that's just within the Milky Way Glaxy. Imagine yourself in Intergallactic Space. A billion of light years away from anything. As if you could tell the difference... A billion light years might as well be a hundred yards.
Billie Jean is not my lover, she's just a girl who claims I am the one...
Staring out at the sky in every direction would look somewhat analagous to what you see when you look up on a clear night. Stars, except, in every direction for a total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, if each had an average of 9 planets... well you do the math.
My point is that there are definitely other sentient beings out there, even if it's very few of them. We have tiny microscopic little eyes pointed out at them, called telescopes, and I can nearly guarantee you the futility in finding other sentient beings out there before we use up every possible resource on our planet there is so much electronic noise out in the universe we'd be lucky to hear someone else trying to send out a signal. Human beings in our current form will most certainly not exist when whatever organic matter that originated on our planet comes to know this.
The communal goal of humanity needs to be to get off this planet, mine other planets, constantly be researching and figuring out everything around the goal of finding these others in the universe... because we really need to confer with them and find out what the hell we're all doing here. It will take thousands of generations to find others in the universe and we better get busy doing this, or get busy dying.
