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I like to point out that the odds of life, as it relates to us, in the galaxy is mitigated by four conditions. Location, conditions, transplantation, and time.
To start with, just by looking at the Milky Way, you can tell that some parts are more likely to have life than others. For example, much of the center of the galaxy is a maelstrom where nothing could live. Then there are parts of the galaxy that have been sterilized by cosmic events, which would wipe out any lifeforms at all in that entire sector of space.
This brings us to conditions. Having the right kind of sun is important, but even so, in the about 4.5 billion years of Earth, life has almost been wiped out many times. We’ve no idea if this is typical, or if some worlds can go for billions of years without such destruction.
In any even, if life does evolve on a world, one of its primary goals must be to avoid annihilation. And the only way it can guarantee this, more or less, is by colonizing other worlds.
But time itself works against this. While the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, the galaxy might be 12 billion years old. And humans have only been around a tiny fraction of that time. Vast cosmic empires might have risen and fallen before Earth even existed.
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We need to start doing infrared surveys the stars in our galaxy, how insane would it be if we found proof of intelligent life out there by finding the telltale signature of structures built by intelligence such a Dyson Swarms and other mega engineering.