Let’s play a game. Try to wrap your mind around this news brief from the BBC:
Number of alien worlds quantified

Intelligent civilisations are out there and there could be thousands of them, according to an Edinburgh scientist.
The discovery of more than 330 planets outside our solar system in recent years has helped refine the number of life forms that are likely to exist.
The current research estimates that there are at least 361 intelligent civilisations in our Galaxy and possibly as many as 38,000.
The work is reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

As the full article reports, this research is based on some creative mathematics and not a little guesswork. Still, the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live, is estimated to be 100,000 light years in diameter (587,460,168,233,670,000.00 Miles). That’s pretty big, so I take the given calculation (“at least 361″) to be correct.

361 other species/cultures/societies/planets that are either near-to, equal-to, or exceeding human capacity in all areas. Intelligence, stupidity, strength, caring, malice, technology, art, wisdom; an endless list of qualities.

How do you suppose we measure up? Not well, likely. Here’s two other science articles released the same day as the one above:

1. How to control a herd of Humans
2. How your brain is hard-wired for God

We’re each born stupid; many do not improve much after birth. Our biological deck is stacked against us in so many ways. Don’t believe me? Check this list of cognitive biases, it might be easier to count the number you haven’t honestly fallen prey to.

When someone you know is behaving embarrassingly, you can pretend you don’t know who they are (“…yeah, I know, what a jerk. I think he’s drunk…”). But what happens when “aliens” actually make contact with us? Then it’s a species thing.

Well none of this has stopped us from counting the stars, and dreaming of distant planets and their potential inhabitants. Humans have a rich history (& future to come) of thinking big – here’s hoping we don’t all kill each other before the enlightenment.

If you really want to test the limits of your imagination, go for a grand tour of mind expanding thought on wikipedia. Here’s some suggested reading:

1. Climate engineering
2. Dyson sphere
3. Planetary engineering
4. Banaue Rice Terraces
5. Atlantropa
6. Stellar engine
7. Alderson disk
8. Spacecraft engineering
9. Virgin_Earth Challenge
10. Star lifting
11. Hollow earth
12. Stellar engineering
13. Lagrange point
14. Terraforming
15. Abiogenesis
16. Trans Global Highway
17. X-Seed 4000
18. Kardashev scale
19. Fog bow
20. Moonbow
21. Sun dog
22. Flat Earth Society
23. Turtles all the way down
24. Carl Sagan
25. Vertical farming
26. Megastructures
27. Expanding Earth theory
28. Spaceship Moon Theory
29. Futurology
30. Outer Space Treaty
31. Weather control
32. Autonomous building
33. Permaculture
34. Orbital
35. Artificial world
36. Asteroid deflection strategies
37. Asteroid mining
38. Stanford torus