A rather self-indulgent piece, with a few logical errors.
However, to examine the axiom, let’s start with the two obvious problems of “intelligence meeting intelligence” in the galaxy. They are distance and time.
Distance is pretty obvious. The nearest star to Sol is about 4 light years away. The nearest habitable star? Good question. Probably between 200-2000 light years away. But just because it can support some kind of life, doesn’t mean it does support life, much less intelligent life.
And this is where the time problem comes in. About 99% of the species that once lived on Earth are gone. A lot when you consider the profusion of life that currently exists. People have only been intelligent for maybe 100,000 years, and only technologically capable for a little over a hundred.
One hundred years in a world that is about 4.5 billion years old. In a galaxy about 12 billion years old.
About every 100 million years in the last half billion years, the Earth has had a major extinction event, wiping much of the slate clean, with most of the major forms of life having to start anew. There might have been 15 other such events that weren’t quite as bad, but still awful in that last 540 million years.
And there are far more things that *could* completely wipe out life on Earth than have been inflicted on us. And I mean a sterilized world, not even bacteria left.
So how long can an intelligent species last? If we remain on Earth, perhaps another 100,000 years, if we’re lucky.
200,000 out of 12 billion years. 1/60th of the life of the galaxy. If it is anything like other intelligent life forms, it really reduces our chances of meeting somebody else. If the distance doesn’t get you, the time will.
How many galactic empires could have risen and fallen in that time?
Don’t even get your hopes up for finding artifacts from alien civilizations. The best we could probably hope for is to find very long-lived nuclear isotopes that don’t occur in nature. The ones we have created will most certainly survive mankind.
Ironically, those may be our best chance at contacting another intelligent species. If we created an asteroid-like projectile, then sent it into space at high speed, even if it was completely melted ten thousand times, such isotopes would not be destroyed.
I seriously doubt bacteria could ever be totally wiped out, short of the Earth itself plunging into the sun.
They’ve found them living in the 20,000 foot depth range, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if that’s up to 30,000 or so by now.
And I have no doubt there’s life out there. Earth life on Mars, at least. Given we’ve found Martian rocks in Antarctica, the odds are so close to certainty that you could bet the farm on it that sometime in the past, at least once, some Earth impact put some infected rocks and junk in orbit and it made it’s way to Mars.
The Sudbury event could have done it. 1.2 billion years ago, a little bitty rock crashed into the Canadian shield not far north of Lake Huron.
Except the rock was bigger than mount Everest, and struck with such fury that it literally flipped over part of the crust like a pancake!
And deposited hundreds of millions of tons of high grade metal ores in the process.
Lots of assumptions . . .
little adequate frame of reference or perspective to even begin to assess reasonably accurately
how off the wall such assumptions may or may not be.
Arrogance on the part of very limited, very constrained observers does not automatically translate into lofty knowledge no matter how convinced the observers are that they are jr gods with reality well understood and measured.
We all see through the glass very darkly and very feebly.
Notions to the contrary are at best grossly overblown.