Maybe it depends on how the Creator decided to have things work out.
The vastness of the universe in time and space is incomprehensible. There are more galaxies than there are stars in our own galaxy.
There can be no doubt that millions of life supporting planets have existed, exist now or in the future, but the nearest one is easily millions of light years away.
For all practical purposes, we are alone.
When I was a student in the 60s just about every scientist or sci-fi enthusiast thought there was life in other parts of the universe. Sort of like Star Trek.
I remember Billy Graham saying something like this: “If there are other worlds, it is likely that they never rebelled against God.”
Our sample size of planets that contain life is n=1. That is a pretty small sample on which to make any kind of assumption or prediction about life elsewhere in the universe.
“so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Well... the same is true of the entire Universe, yet it exists.
Duh....I’ve seen honest astronomers say stars like ours with planets like ours appear to be extremely rare
Assuming there is “life” on other worlds, no matter how far, it would be foolish to believe that life to be like us. It could very well be based upon some other unique chemical conditions. So different that even if we “met” that “life”, it could be as alien as the microbes clustered around deep sea volcanic vents.
“so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Life as we know it in our example of one. Why do we have to make the assumption that all life everywhere has to have those conditions satisfied the same way, or with the same seeming effort?
Freegards
Observational evidence up to this point has always indicated that life is rare. The ratio of living mass to non-living mass on Earth is just four parts in ten billion. When considering the entire Solar System life is much rarer than that.
This seems a strange claim to make. Darwin knew absolutely nothing of genes, and so he was entirely ignorant of the physical basis for the phenomenon of variation which was crucial to his theory.
Crick and Watson founded a whole new realm of life science. Even in the last few decades the techniques of this realm have undergone a revolution which increased the experimental capabilities by orders of magnitude.
Then there's the Woesian Revolution of the new Archaean Domain, which provides a new basis for thinking about life's origin.
Of course, one could always say that we are still far from any sort of ultimate knowledge of this process, but we ain't done yet! In fact we are still picking up steam, in my view.
I’ve always said this.
For a time I worked at the worlds largest IR/optical telescopes and had many hours of working with the world’s most renown observers while installing new instruments. Most don’t admit to believing in a “creator”. But they get really quiet when you ask how so much mass and energy could come from a single point as our observable evidence indicates. Common response is, I didn’t make the place I just observe it.
It would be arrogant to think that God made only us in his image( how ever many millions of years or “days” that took), but God certainly made sure that even if we found another life, it would be nearly impossible to interact with it given our Physics and physical universe constraints.
The most important thing we must learn is that that we are ignorant of what we don’t know.
There are many documentaries you can watch. Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate SG-1, Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet etc. All show life on other planets....
I’m an “Alien Atheist”.
one might as well think of the origin of matter.
In 1835 the French philosopher Auguste Comte predicted that we would never know anything about the chemical composition of stars.
Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull’s most famous attributed utterance is that “everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Science fiction is fun but fiction nonetheless, ideas and stories from the human imagination. God made us on this planet and there’s nothing else out there, no aliens, no extraterrestrials, no spaceships from far away solar systems or galaxies monitoring life on earth. The pyramids and Machu Pichu and those gigantic, perfectly assembled walls made of huge blocks of stone with joints so precise that you can’t slip a piece of paper between in South America were all man made, end of story. Call me ignorant but prove me wrong.
Commence flaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_results
Intelligence surely is....