first, lets have a good chat about what “Distance that matters” is...
Voyager 1... launched 50 years ago. 16 Billion miles away... 24 hours at light speed away... ...and no other sign of life.
is that more or less than Distance that matters??
I would say this guy is correct in his assumptions..
24 hours at light speed is nothing, even inside our own galaxy. The nearest star is about 4-1/4 light years away. Distance has no bearing on whether there is life “out there”, only on the chances that we creatures who have only been around for something less than a cosmic eyeblink can find other life with our current primitive technology.
Your argument makes as much sense as Ben Franklin stepping outside his door, looking around, and concluding that coelacanths do not exist.
Even if we had proper means to detect life or lack of it, MUCH further away than Voyager has gone, say, a sphere 100 light years in diameter, our experience is essentially “zero”. That volume compared to the Universe is roughly like comparing a large grain of sand to the entire Earth. If you have improper perspective on Earth’s size relative to your own perception, you need to try walking and swimming around it.
The only really useful things we know, relevant to the question of “is there life out there?”, are that life on THIS rock occupies a very wide range of extreme environments, and, even if we limit ourselves to life requiring liquid water, we are finding liquid water, often in vast volumes, in many bodies in our solar system. Yes, it is usually in water with ammonia in it. So what? Ever hear of Kakabekia barghoorniana? It LIKES ammonia, up to 50% at pH levels above 9. Yet it also tolerates oxygen well.
In truth, beyond the observations I just noted about adaptability and water, we are about a trillion trillion times too inadequate to do a conclusive search to override those observations.