Have you ever been hanging out with a group of friends or peers, and suddenly had the sinking realization that you are stuck with - how shall I say this politely - the losers?

Now you know how I felt last night. Bear with me for a few paragraphs while I meander a bit.

New reports say that there actually may be over 300 sextillion stars with trillions and trillions of planets orbiting them.

Out of 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, it's a pretty good bet that our civilization is neither the only one, nor the most advanced. 

This raises again an old and obvious question: where are all the others? Why don't we see space ships whizzing through space, and why don't we hear signals - or even noise - from other civilizations?

Perhaps the answer is related to another puzzling question. Scientists are starting to realize that there is more invisible dark matter in the universe than there is the stuff we see and that comprises our reality.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory website explains that many different lines of evidence suggest that the mass of dark matter... is about 5 or 6 times greater than the mass of ordinary baryonic matter such as protons and neutrons.  

This is why last night I had that awful sinking feeling (not coincidentally as I was about to watch a mindless TV show): what if dark matter is intelligence, and we are stuck on the stupid side of the universe?

Futurist Ray Kurzweil likes to talk about the Singularity, the point at which human development advances so quickly we can't see past it. He expects that in less than 50 years human and technological intelligence will blend, and that this combined intelligence will literally start to spread across the universe.

But if something like this is inevitable, with 300 sextillion stars out there, it probably has already happened.

What if those civilizations advanced enough to travel past their planets, to communicate and interact with others, are only visible to others of equal or greater intelligence? See what I mean? Turns out we failed that test. This would explain why we can't see or hear them.

What if we live on the wrong side of the tracks?

There may be a bright side. Once you realize you are stuck on the wrong side of the tracks, you can at least aspire to move to the other side. Until now, we may have been blissfully living in ignorance. (Smarter than ever! Almost as cool as Star Trek! Google rocks!)

In my limited understanding of history, it seems that in nearly every generation, humans believed that they had all the secrets. Yet, the next generation almost always proves us wrong.

I'd like to believe that constant partisan bickering over both trivial and vital issues represents the antithesis of advanced civilization, not the pinnacle. Can you imagine an advanced society that can't agree on almost anything?

Read the newspaper. War, poverty, drugs, turmoil. These are the type of ills that ought to be quarantined on a planet rather than allowed to spread beyond it.

If the new estimate is correct, there are roughly 42 trillion stars for every person on Earth. The average human lives for about 2.5 billion seconds. Even if you devoted your entire life to counting "your" stars, you wouldn't come close. In fact, it would take you 16,800 lifetimes to do it.

There's life out there. Lots of it. Some of it really smart. Maybe we ought to stop acting like spoiled kids and start working together. I'd really like to experience life on the smarter side.