nBSG tries it's hardest not to be Sci Fi. They should have thought of that before they put in the killer robots.
they put in human-built robots, which are *utterly plausible* given the amount of robots we use even today, as opposed to Forehead Aliens of the Week.
In the BSGverse, humans are the only sentient race that developed. They never even contemplate that aliens might exist.
Yes, they make it a point (in the 3rd episode explicitly stated) that as in real life, "the galaxy is pretty desolate when you get down to it": i.e. inhabitable planets are actually very rare, and discovering one is actually a big enough event to carry a season-ending cliffhanger. They do find other planets, but they're usually airless rocks, or frozen wastelands, or rocky moons with no oxygen in their atmosphere.
For all intents and purposes, just as the survivors are stranded on the Island on Lost, in a parallel way, on BSG they're "marooned" on Galactica. They make it a point even that they can't have "shore leave" and get "cranky" after months of being sealed in cramped ships which were never meant for long-term living.
***"Firefly" did a similar concept...a lot of people compare the two series, in a positive way, and I think its a new direction for the genre; but the conceit of Firefly was that hundreds of years had already been spent terraforming terraforming hundreds of planets to be Earth-like (BSG kind of did the same thing, but they only had 12 planets...which were presumably terraformed once, or they intentionally settled there because they were so habitable...)
but I digress....
I'm not feeling so deprived, personally.
