

Phrases like the the West or Middle East make sense when all relative to Great Britain in geography.
The British had colonies all over and the terms like middle east and the west stuck. It’s also a reason for the most common world map, the Mercator projection.




Time and Space is so vast that alien civilizations may have already come and gone in that time span.
Humans have only been around for a blink of a eye in the timeline of the universe. It could be some alien civilizations are only starting to evolve from bacteria at this very moment, or another few have already gone extinct thousands of years ago.