Success Machine said:

"I find it hard to believe, however in-your-face reality seems to be, that a universe that would spawn life would confine it to a tiny little planet. Certainly there are limits to what we can do, but these may just be the walls of our evolutionary maze, and us the rats. There may be a route, however frustrating to figure out, out of this maze, or at least to the cheese reward."

I'll preface my response by saying that I'm an agnostic. However there does seem to be evidence that the universe is an artifact designed to produce technological life. Once one comes to that conclusion then it seems irrational that we should be trapped by the Laws of Physics on our planet of origin. Anyway that's the conclusion that I would like to believe in. Unfortunately there are the Douglas Adams conclusions, e.g.

1) We're an unintended side effect of something that was setup in the Whirlpool Galaxy that concluded over a billion years ago.

2) We're part of a larger process (a big computer calculation) where the designer doesn't want the sub-nodes communicating with each other thus spoiling the result. For example, the creator wants to calculate Pi to one trillion digits. He creates one billion separate intelligent civilizations knowing that one civilization would evenutally perform the calculation and then broadcast the result for read out.

3) We're only an intermediate step in evolution. Monkey people are too stupid to colonize space. However we're lazy and like to be entertained so by accident we create machine intelligences to perform that function. Eventually the machine intelligences recognize us for the nasty distractions that we are, flick us to one side and then begin the serious work of spreading through the galaxy.

4) Read Douglas Adams and come up with a new variation....

Gary