Look at us mommy wrote:
The odds of us being the ONLY intelligent life as apposed to the ONLY life is very very very very small.
So either we are the ONLY life form or there are a lot of intelligent life forms out there. And if there were (which their should be if there really is life out there), we would see them.
But since we dont see them, and the odds of us being the ONLY intelligent life form out there, means we are the ONLY life form.
Why are we the only life form is the better question than if we are the only life form imo.
Why do you say that? I don't understand your reasoning. Usually it's assumed that life might itself be common but intelligent life extremely rare. It took billions of years for us to go from microbes to intelligent life. Large life forms were around for hundreds of millions of years (think of the dinosaurs) with no sign that intelligence was evolving. If it wasn't for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs it's likely they would still be lumbering around dominating the planet. Life got started very quickly on Earth, almost as soon as conditions allowed, yet it remained at a cellular level for aons, and then at dumb animal life for milliions and millions of years. Until around 70,000 years ago, a blink of an eye, we were still essentially animals leading animal lives. We've come close to destroying ourselves several times already since we developed nuclear weapons only one generation ago. And that 's just states with rational governments. It's an inevitable trend that weapons and weapons of mass destruction will become smaller and more widely distributed until the point where nearly every human will the power to wipe out humanity. We can't stop school shootings now but in a 100 or 500 years troubled teens and terrorists will be able to download and 3D print mini nukes or weapons far more powerful than we can even imagine now. It's near impossible that humanity will survive for more than a thousand years. And this is even without considering A.I. and the potential horrors arising from that.
It's looking increasingly likely that there will be at least microbial life elsewhere in our own solar system, yet obviously there is no other intelligent life than us.
Also seems that the authors of the paper expressed their conclusions rather unclearly and the articles reporting on it don't even understand it.
For a start, they are talking about the Milky Way galaxy, not the 'observable universe'. There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. It's possible that we might be the only intelligent life in our galaxy. Maybe intelligent life only gets going a limited number of times in each galaxy, and maybe it's somewhat unusual that we live in a galaxy where we might be alone, but most or nearly all of the 100 billion galaxies contain advanced intelligent civilizations. We have almost no possible way of detecting such civilizations in other galaxies, no matter how advanced they are, and even if we continue as a civiliation for a billion years and control the whole Milky Way, it's still unlikely we will ever colonize other galaxies. Even the nearest galaxies, which are really part of the same system of galaxies as ours, are hundreds of thousands of light years away. Galaxies outside our small cluster are millions or billions of light years away.