True - Edit 1
Before modification by Isaac at 30/09/2011 10:39:08 PM
it'd be like dotting a handful of different, non-flying insects in say a cathedral, not just on the floor but all over the place, and expecting them to all meet slap bang in the middle at the same time.
Hypothetically, that sort of thing could happen simply from there being something that lured them there. In this sort of context, a big old Dyson Swarm that used all it's juice to transmit the values for Pi, along with lesser signals for "Howdy..." type messages.
it'll probably take us another 400,000 or more years to be able to get out of the milky way alone.
That's a pretty probable value barring massive changes in our understanding of physics
But 400,000 years, if the history of our world is just one day, is around ten seconds of that day.