Life on Earth has managed to meet countless challenges in order to get to where we are now. Most of those were met long before our ancestors climbed down from the trees to explore the savanna. Today, we humans seem naturally inclined to peer into the vast expanse of the universe and to wonder, are we alone? While this is the essential question of astrobiology, any attempts to answer it, even state of the art approaches, are subject to a pernicious confirmation bias. Simply put, an enormous multidisciplinary effort has shown that many factors contributed to our existence. However, we are completely ignorant of the frequency of planets with life, especially complex life, beyond Earth. That ignorance is merely a current observational limitation. Yet when com- bined with the extraordinary hospitable conditions on Earth, that bias tends to blind the rational mind to the multitude of possible alternative Earth histories. When we find planets in the stellar habitable zone, we have to ask habitable for what? Many of those worlds will never or will not have yet have resulted in a technological civilization. We suggest that technological civilizations have only relatively recent emerged in the local universe. Further, we suggest that challenges for technological civilizations are far from over. Some of these challenges will be overcome by engineering efforts. For example, any technological society will need to quickly defend its civ- ilization against otherwise inevitable asteroid impacts. Some harmful astrophysical factors, like gamma-ray bursts, maybe unavoidable for some planets. Unquestionably, for any society to suc- ceed beyond the habitable lifetime of their home world, a high degree of technology aided by considerable luck must be developed. We review some of these challenges, by examining astro- physical environments in the local universe. With optimism, we consider a few engineering and bioethical challenges that our decedents might face.