Hello Archimedes Plutonium ,
How life must evolve the same way everywhere ,
regardless of the planet , You wrote ,
" In other words , all 100 planets had to have
a population large enough to build bicycles
and to build their first airplane
such that they were overpopulated
and would soon have to engage in a World War
on their planet to relieve their overpopulations "

No , Fictitious assets , a.k.a. fictitious debts ,
causes wars , not overpopulation .

Technology makes bankers , like the Clinton era Greenspan ,
throw all the " Old " rules out .
Mountains of fictitious assets are created ,
Investors get burned , causing a tech bust .
Jobs are then lost . And trade barriers go up .

This pattern is repeated over and over again ,
in something like 30 year cycles .

Kennedy did it too ,
when he sent the U.S. to the moon and Vietnam ,
thus forcing the more level-headed Nixon
to pull the dollar off the gold standard to pay for it .

Then , just like now , the price of commodities ,
went through the roof , i.e. the dollar plunged .
( In the last few years , the price of a barrel of oil
has gone from under 10 dollars to about 33 today )

Bye the way , speaking of aliens , life as we know it
requires a very exacting temperature range .
And we observe that our universe is continually cooling .

Quantum spookiness , Minkowskian spacetime ( SR )
and Einsteinian spacetime ( GR ) are all related .

Negative energies have even been measured :
" The [ negative , gravitationally repulsive ]
vacuum energy density leads to
an accelerating expansion of the Universe .
...
Now we have the supernova data that suggests that
the vacuum energy density is greater than zero . "
_ http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_constant.html

Recent supernova data suggests that universe
( as we perceive it ) is likely to be progressing
from the infinitely hot Big Bang
to the infinitely cold Big Freeze .

So the universe seems to be progressing
not just through the Einsteinian timescape ,
but also though a " Heatscape " ...
Which might therefore be thought of as
the fifth spatial dimension .

I assume that Relativistic mass ( i.e. energy or heat )
is a fifth " Spatial " dimension ,
into which spacetime curves ... i.e. The heatscape .
( I put " Spatial " in quotes
because our information about that is incomplete ,
so it's a metaphysical concept )

So at 10 ^ -X seconds after the big bang ,
as X approaches infinity ,
the degrees Kelvin probably approaches infinity .
And at 10 ^ X years after the big bang ,
as X approaches infinity ,
the degrees Kelvin probably approaches zero .

So you could say that entropy , i.e. unavailable heat ,
is " Forever " stretching out
the fabric of spacetime .
Like a small hitch in the " Normal " order of things .
( I put " Forever " in quotes
because that's a metaphysical concept )

Metaphysically :
Instead of there being something before the big bang ,
it's possible to imagine a scientist
who's scale of spacetime keeps getting smaller ,
and who's scale of Heat *2 keeps getting larger ,
the closer he might get to the big bang .
I can imagine him getting ever closer ,
but never quite reaching the beginning of the big bang .

*2 Actually relativistic mass , i.e. energy or heat .