might have planets. That's far over a viginillion, which is ten to the 20th power. Smart life took 5 billion years to evolve here...the cosmos is 13 billion yrs old. Some alien societies may be 6 billion yrs older than us...allowing their planets two billion yrs before getting started, because the early cosmos was turmoil. Since the first problem aliens would tackle would be mortality, ... Once they solved that, they would age indefinitely. So we will someday run into beings who are 6 billion years old, who have 6 billion years of science lab research to draw upon. That is a lot of research. Not only data on things like lasers, but also upping their own intelligence. 6 billion years of increasing it. Each increase helps them find new ways to increase further. An acceleration of improvement that leads to a graph of the hyperbola form. Q. What marvels will that enable them to do?