Starting a new story

I can see why you'd think that, when we think about the Trek universe where every alien has warp technology and there are dozens of them running around local space.

But look at it from the aliens' perspective, and consider the universes that writers like Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and others write in. If the aliens couldn't build warp ships, there is no reason why they couldn't have thought they were alone (or extremely isolated) in the universe, and that any other aliens out there wouldn't be able to travel to where they were in any reasonable span of time.

Part of what I was trying to convey is that space is unimaginably vast. Part of canon Enterprise's problem was that they made the Trekverse small and crowded again, right out of the gate, with the whole Earth to Q'O'Nos in four days, the Ferengi, the Borg, etc.

That being said, I did write a Trek story in the Trek verse, and that is a crowded verse. So I can see your issues here. As always, thanks for the feedback.

Marso's right...there could be a huge party going right now at Alpha Centauri and we wouldn't know shit about it...

Kind of a side note, but funny you should mention that:

It's ironic that with all the extrasolar planets we've discovered around nearby stars, we remain virtually blind with regards to Rigil Kent A and B. Being binaries that orbit each other with a decent eccentricity, it would probably be difficult to impossible to detect the 'wobble' that they use to find gas giants orbitting nearby stars. As for terrestrial sized planets, forget it. We'll need the TPF up and running, and when we do they need to take a close look at that system. Rigil Kent A is a G-type star so similar to our sun that it will make me cry if there are no planets.

Then again, with two stars in such close proximity, it could be that most of the matter that could have gone into planets wound up going into the second star instead. We'll find out eventually...

There's actually quite some amount of hope for this system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_centauri

The stars are too close to permit gas giants like ours, but there's some hope for Terrestrial worlds.