The Milky Way

Ever wondered how vast and mysterious our galaxy really is? Here's some insight:

http://www.astrosurf.com/sguisard/Pagim/GC.html
This is an incredibly large image of the region around the center of our galaxy. Zoom in and look around. How can one think that we're on the only planet with life in the universe with this many stars just in our galaxy?

http://www.gigagalaxyzoom.org/B.html
This is a panorama of the plane of our galaxy. Again, look at the billions of stars that we can see in just these images. If we are the only life forms out there, how disappointing would that be? Think about it. A whole universe in which we are only a mere speck, yet we're the only speck of life. How lonely would we be in this universe if we discovered that we're the only life forms in existence?

http://www.sergebrunier.com/gallerie/pleinciel/
I particularly like this image. It's an image sphere. Click and drag around to see just how vast our local universe is. There's so much to it that you can't even imagine. Look up into the day time sky and see the Sun. What if there were at least one intelligent life form per one hundred thousand stars. Think of how many civilizations would exist!

If You Haven't Noticed...
If you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of the potential for extraterrestrial life. If we are the only existing intelligent life form in this incredibly large and vast universe then what would that mean? All of these questions that cannot be answered disturb me every day. What would we do if an alien life form were to show up on Earth say tomorrow. Would we be friendly? Would we put them "under arrest" and study them? Would we even notice? What would they do? Would they demand domination over the entire species? Request us to pay tribute? Recruit us for some sort of intergalactic war? There's so much to ask and so little answered. Our next major scientific goal should be to develop a self-sustained spacecraft for interstellar travels.

This isn't an easy task though. One thing we hugely rely on to get from place to place is fuel. How would we create a spacecraft which is self-sustaining in fuel? Currently all of our fuel sources (aside from solar power) rely on the Earth's resources. Would it even be possible to have a self-sustaining spacecraft? The Earth isn't exactly self-sustaining. As Dr. Siana expressed in his final lecture, the Earth is actually running out of resources. We're gradually depleting its plethora of fuel and will very soon have to discover some new, extremely efficient manner.

Perhaps self-sustainability isn't the answer? Maybe we just need to find a low-mass, high-energy source of energy to serve as fuel for times more than just a few months? Maybe several years? I'd say we should figure out how to turn Solar energy into thrust, but I expect that soon enough we'll be wanting to travel beyond the practical reaches of the Sun's solar winds.

The final question is how will we explore the final frontier?