When I look up at the stars I'm the night sky, they're very pretty, but mostly dead space. I want to live in a galaxy where there are literally millions of Rembrandts, Feynmans, Gauss', etc born every second. Intelligent life in all its forms is beautiful, and I want to see it light up our universe.

That is a nice picture, but by all accounts, wouldn’t we already expect to see this if that were the path before us? Not to say that we will burn out, but I think extrapolating from our flashpoint existence will most likely be erroneous.

Our form of life gets easier and easier to spawn as carbon density increases in new solar systems. When ours was formed 4.5 billion years ago, carbon had just started really accumulating to that critical point. It's totally feasible that we're just the first ones to wake up in our corner of easily observable space.