Also interesting and related, there is a sweet spot in time for your species to even know anything outside your solar system exists. Soon after the big bang, not enough time for sentience to be able to grasp what they are seeing. To long after the big bang, the expansion of the universe put all those distant stars too far away to see and you only see your own solar system when you look up.
Discussion
What tells you that the only thing the universe can do is keep expanding?
Only the fact that we have only ever seen it expand. I'm not saying that in the smug "duh" sense. If we found out tomorrow that it oscillates expanding and contracting in very slow cycles and just started contracting back to a finite point, I'd believe it. The behavior would be very wavelike and physics loves waves.