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Icy_Blackberry_3759 t1_jcvd19p wrote

I think it’s fairly obvious: life is an inevitable phenomenon, and highly intelligent life follows, but the universe is extremely vast and the conditions for life to exist are rare enough that the physical distances and are literally astronomical against the light speed limit. So there might be several life forms out there capable of seeking out and contacting other life forms, but that’a another level of steep probability- even if there were fifty thousand such life forms, and their search lasted hundreds of thousands of years at near light speeds, the vastness of the universe really just makes the chances of them coming across us and contacting us fairly slim. The speed of light is a pretty strict limit.

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jafinn t1_jcvjh21 wrote

There's this and also time. Advanced civilisations could have risen and perished in billions of years. It only took us something like a billion years from simple multi-celled organisms to space flight. And it's really a tiny speck of time we've been sending out radio waves or anything that might be picked up by someone.

There could have been inhabitants a couple of solar systems over and we'd probably never know (at least not yet).

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Valuable-Extreme t1_jcw2ibn wrote

Don’t forget the radius… It is roughly 50 or 60 ly as early radio transmissions were to weak to get far enough without being weaker than background noise… Therefore we can only assume there is no intelligent life in a radius of 25 to 30 ly as they could have answered by now. That is just a super small area of space… We can only listen to them at this point…

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AnchorKlanker t1_jcvk4fy wrote

So far as we know now. But what we know now is doubtlessly incomplete.

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