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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Chance" data-source="post: 290768" data-attributes="member: 2795">What I mean....No, I mean there is no intelligent life anywhere in this galaxy except here.  Other galaxies are so far away that considering them in the question is nonsensical.Given the vast number of stars in this galaxy and the age of this galaxy, if there was but a single intelligent species other than us with the capability for interstellar travel, we'd have already been visited time and time again.  Aliens would be living next door to us.Exhausted planet resources and dying stars would provide good motives for exploration and homesteading. Some cultures, like our own, would find other motives for colonizing, and it would only take one enterprising population to begin exponential expansion. Fermi showed that, even assuming modest speeds, every habitable star system in the galaxy should have been colonized within mere millions, not billions, of years. Complete colonization could take place in the relative twinkling of a cosmic eye, many times over, in a ten-billion-year-old galaxy like the Milky Way. "So," asked Fermi, "where are they?"The answer:  No where because they don't exist.  There is no scientific data that leads to any other conclusion, although there is a whole lot of science fiction masquerading as science fact.</blockquote>