The big problem is this... If life is common when circumstances are right, then complex life systems should already exist, some being millions of years old. Imagine homo sapiens one million years from now... At the very least we would have invested in beacons transmitted intelligent signals to star systems with the potential for life... Where are the signals?
You assume that “they” would be more or less as sophisticated as Earth. That might not be the case. You can find a dozen-odd cases where civilization on Earth might have been set back a hundred years or a thousand years....if one single event had gone in a different direction. Just imagine if the Black Plague had not finished itself off around 1666, and reoccurred another dozen times. Or if the 1918 Flu had mutated a bit and come around a second time by 1921. Or if the Soviets and the US had gotten into a nuke-fight over Cuba.
There might be a hundred more Earths out there with civilizations....but a thousand years behind us.
The big problem is this... If life is common when circumstances are right, then complex life systems should already exist, some being millions of years old. Imagine homo sapiens one million years from now... At the very least we would have invested in beacons transmitted intelligent signals to star systems with the potential for life... Where are the signals?
...
The Fermi Paradox.
Also imagine where our technology will be thousands of years from now, or even millions.
+1 Fermi Paradox on your observation that alien civilizations probably don’t exist.
The extreme rarity of conditions necessary to sustain life on earth is hardly an argument for the necessity of a Creator. That is a matter of faith. One either believes in a Creator, or one believes that universe sprang forth from nothing and evolved into complex systems. Then one adduces evidence to support his faith.
Unfortunately for creationists, their Creator remains silent and hidden, and the only evidence they have for His existence consists of some very old, unscientific texts and their own sincere faith. Well, that and the fact that nobody can point to specific, reproducible examples of evolution following abiogenesis. One the other hand, those who wish exclude the Creator can point to a geological record that supports a theory of evolution. Abiogenesis remains a problem.
In any case, the argument in this article does not support the existence of a Creator: in an infinitely large universe, any non-zero probability is possible no matter how small the probability.
Imagine some life existing in the universe for ‘billions’ of years, mastering all aspects of the natural universe, including travel by means about which we can only imagine.
Some might think they were god(s).
Just sayin’...
It is not just distance, but time, and both of them are enormous. Add to that “location” in the galaxy, in that Earth is in one of the Milky Way’s “backwaters”, where things are rather dull. A little offshoot to a big spiral arm.
Periodically there will be an event like a supernova, that sterilizes a big area in the galaxy. So even if there was an advanced civilization, occupying hundreds of worlds, it could have been wiped out within seconds of their realizing a problem. Every form of life including microbes would be dead.