Jeroen said: > To quote Jody Foster in _Contact_: "If we are alone, then it seems > like an awful waste of space". :-)
However, life like us requires small rocky planets and a few billion years for evolution. The planets in turn require the enrichment of the primordial hydrogen/helium mixture by a generation or two of stars, which requires time for galaxies and stars to form and for a large number of stars to die and hence enrich the galactic medium enough for rocky planets to be possible. This might take quite a few billion years. In all this time, the universe is expanding. Even if we were the first life in the whole universe, we'd still expect to see a vast and ancient cosmos. Rich GCU Weak Anthropic Argument
