My thoughts too. If we knew there were only 10,000 stars, it could seem likely that the chances of life existing are 1/50,000, and we happen to be lucky. But there are over 100 billion stars in the observable universe.
I think the law of large numbers applies here. The likelihood of life existing being high enough that we are the only ones, but low enough that our existence isn't winning some 1 in a googolplex chance just strikes me as an anthropocentric conceit.
The size of the universe is a large number, but the chance of life just forming from chaos is 1/(a large number). So the odds of life elsewhere in the universe is, roughly, a large number divided by another large number. The question is which large number is larger?
We don't know how difficult it is to create life. The universe is big, but the difficulty of creating life might be much bigger.
Thus. It is not certain that there is life elsewhere.
Just today we found the closest star to us to have a planet in the habitable zone.
The closest star. But, we struggle to observe it in any capacity. Indeed, only today we did. And that's nothing to say of the next closest star, or the next, or the next, ad (nearly) infinitum.
If planets in this zone aren't as rare as we think, life in the universe might also not be as rare as we think.
To me, the question is more "where," rather than "if."
The fact that life appeared on earth very shortly after it formed gives us a good indicator that Abiogenesis may not be that rare.
Something that's probably a lot more rare is favorable conditions over a long time period. It took a long time for life on planet earth to evolve into more complex forms.
I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones out there. But will mankind and our space neighbours exist long enough to facilitate communication?
Is every species that is competitive enough to subdue all other life on its planet doomed to disintegrate due to internal conflict?
Here's one possibility: intelligent life is sufficiently rare yet the universe is sufficiently large that the universe contains a very large number (possibly even an infinite number) of intelligent civilisations, but they are all sufficiently distant from each other in space and/or time that the odds of any of them ever interacting with each other (or even knowing of each others' existence) is extremely low.
e.g. imagine a universe containing a million intelligent civilisations, but each of those intelligent civilisations is in a separate galaxy at least 100 million light years apart. If that is our universe, we might not encounter any of those other civilisations in the next million years. The odds of human extinction could easily be higher than the odds of having any contact with them.
Oh sure it's a particularly human conceit that that number be exactly 1. But it certainly might be that the number is low enough that it will be very very hard for us to ever detect or interact with other life.
the number of stars out there is more like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces, or 1 billion trillion in observable universe. which is just a subset of whole universe. pretty good chances for something out there. hopefully not as xenophobix as humans these days (and more advanced at the same time)
I think the law of large numbers applies here. The likelihood of life existing being high enough that we are the only ones, but low enough that our existence isn't winning some 1 in a googolplex chance just strikes me as an anthropocentric conceit.