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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 9079607" data-attributes="member: 58197">With our sample size of one, we know far too little to assert anything with confidence. We don't know how likely it is that life arises on a given planet, or makes the countless evolutionary innovations needed for sapience, within the limited period during which that planet is habitable. (Earth has a window of maybe 5 billion years, and it took 4 billion to evolve us.) We don't know how difficult it is to make the leap to interstellar travel without self-annihilating first. And we don't know what aliens with a million-year head start on us would become, whether we would even perceive them as living things. They could be all around us at this moment.But if I have to pick one, I pick "no intelligent aliens." It is the simplest explanation for the fact that we have seen no evidence whatsoever of life beyond our own world.</blockquote>