Could you elaborate on the 'thing floating around' please, I'd like to check it out the topic sounds right up my alley

Thanks for the link really looks interesting, I'll check it out

Why do people instantly rule out the fact that life might be so rare you'd even be lucky to have just one or two in a galaxy. As huge as galaxies are it's pretty unlikely, I agree, but the signs so far do point to it being pretty rare. I feel we can say life as we know it is rare with certainty. We just dont know how rare.

I agree that the vast distances are huge reason as to why we don't see any even if they are here somewhere. Most finite beings would die on the journey to a distance planet or star as it's just that far away. If there's only a couple aliens in our galaxy it's safe to say we'll never meet, you'd need a multi million year life span minimum and tech that can run even longer.

I think there's so many micro factors that go into it like even how our solar system formed is unique as we have more rocky planets than most and small ones at that. Jupiter played a role in that and so already theres such a hugely specific convaluted factor in how a planet like Earth formed, that I'm sure it rules out most solar systems on that fact alone. Of course this is just for life as we know it already that emerged from water and is carbon based, but that is all we can search for as we don't know anything else.

Would u say that the possibility of a galactic wide civilization is not fully ruled out in our own milky way then. Their technology would have to be way more advanced then us to be able to cover a good portion of a galaxy so it very well could go undetected by our standards. There's a part of me that feels it's impossible for a civilization to colonize a galaxy, they are just so mindboggingly huge and vast. I just think by the time a race got to that point they were capable of doing it they would probably fit our description of a god like bejng and they wouldn't even be interested in doing something like that anymore.

Interesting points. I feel we'd almost need a new branch of science, Astrochemistry to get to the bottom of what forms life could take. Non-carbon may still have to be made up of an element in the same group such as Silicon due to its versatility. Huge sentient rocks, maybe even the size of a planet or perhaps sentient asteroids that bypass all our detection of life. I feel advances in chemistry will be the key, we need to know exactly what each element is truly capable of under the different conditions.

The idea of fifth dimensional beings existing outside of time that are almost able to 'look down' at us from above, the same way a 3 dimensional being can physically look down at a 2d being or flatlander, is an amazing thought. The possibility of biological life experiencing time non-linearly is concept I find fascinating, they would be able to know when they die and flit between any point in their lives but their body would still be anchored in one physical point in space. Or that's just one possibility.

There's nothing to say that life might be even rarer than even 1000 billion stars. I believe the fact that we don't see it in even 400 billion stars to points to life being ridiculously rare. Being in any time of void where the galactic density is definitely less than in 'most' areas of space, would mean that we lack the raw number of galaxies to even get 2 civilizations for example.