> I am one who doesn’t think there are any aliens. I think the popular imagination underestimates the complexity of life, the odds against it ever happening, and how uninhabitable the rest of the universe really is.
You are thinking in very limited terms. The vast expanses of space make it nearly impossible to travel to places with current technology to find life. The closest star to us is Alpha Centauri which is 4.3 light years from earth; literally trillions of miles that would take approximately 165,000 years to travel to. With such expanses in space i think the more appropriate answer is we just don’t know and won’t know until one of them decides to park his ship on the WH lawn and announce that they are here. Our finite brains, limited knowledge and lack of understanding just make it nearly impossible to answer this question coherently.