[Windflier]

More likely we are alone than first.

People once believed that if you traveled too far out to sea, that you'd fall off the edge of the world, and that the sun revolved around the earth.

The mind-boggling numbers involved with this question argue in favor of a universe that is teeming with life. The Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the universe, each possessing billions of stars, and trillions of planets.

We don't yet have the technology to fully see all of the planetary systems in our own galaxy, let alone the billions of others out there.

[BenKenobi]

The comment argues that being B+1 in a string is much more unlikely than being 1+B+1, somewhere in the middle. The larger the string the more likely this is true.

[aruanan]

The mind-boggling numbers involved with this question argue in favor of a universe that is teeming with life.

If you calculate the odds that we have arrived where we have by chance, you'll arrive at number that virtually guarantees its impossibility. But let's assume it happened anyway. To find, then, what the odds are that this has happened twice, you have to multiply the first set of odds by itself and so on for each different occurrence you posit. So the likelihood, as likelihood is actually figured in real science, militates against anything like we've seen on this planet ever happening again, much less in such a way that results in a "universe that is teeming with life."