>>16711824
> >humans on earth: bro we are alone
You just listed the premise of the Drake equation. If there are a gorillion planets (this wasn’t actually known until these last decades, it could have been that planet formation was rare), why aren’t we seeing aliens every 5 minutes? If intelligence leads to space faring leads to colonizing other planets then given the age of the galaxy some civ should - even if they only have propulsion as we know it - spread to so many planets it’s self sustaining.
A major problem for the “dude it’s life everywhere” position is that we don’t see it. Now it could be a problem with how we’re looking. Hence the spectral analysis of exoplanets being important (life traces from analyzing element shadows in light). Radio waves was a big argument for a while. If there’s life we should be seeing massive radio signals everywhere. Except we stopped broadcasting like that ourselves and would now be almost invisible in that spectrum. Low power radio towers are not the old time towers that blasted broad wave spectrums at high power into space.

You also have the game theory answers like the dark forest, where it’s best to stay quiet because if there is a superior civ out there their first inclination might well be to bombard the first signs of rival intelligence.

Then there’s the great filter analysis where we’re rare either because we passed a filter (intelligence is rare on our own planet, millions of years of dinos produced fuckall, millions of years of mammals had ONE big intelligence breakthrough). Or it’s still ahead of us (global warming, nuclear war, resource depletion, space debris preventing travel, take a pick).

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Why do People Believe in Aliens?