even if you use the Drake equation and only use .1% for each variable you STILL end up with the possibility of billions of potential locations for life.
But it’s an incredibly huge universe and even billions of life forms spread throughout is still only a tiny tiny fraction in all parts of space.
And over billions of years those fractions come and go.
So it could be a rare event for life to reach out to other planets, and they just don;t hang around a long time.
There seems to be an incredibly amount of evidence of lost civilizations right here on earth. People that live hundreds of thousands of years ago or even millions.
Just look at places where we KNOW people used to live. Archaeologists need to sift through dirt to find things.
billions and billions