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Aliens and the Fermi Paradox
First time accepted submitter sayhem (1842674) writes Various explanations for why we don't see aliens have been proposed—perhaps interstellar travel is impossible or maybe civilizations are always self-destructive. But with every new discovery of a potentially habitable planet, the Fermi Paradox becomes increasingly mysterious. There could be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way alone. This impression is only reinforced by the recent discovery of a "Mega-Earth," a rocky planet 17 times more massive than the Earth but with only a thin atmosphere. Previously, it was thought that worlds this large would hold onto an atmosphere so thick that their surfaces would experience uninhabitable temperatures and pressures. But if this isn't true, there is a whole new category of potentially habitable real estate in the cosmos.
So given the size of the universe, we know from just here that there's definitely been life and intelligent life favorable conditions elsewhere just from the limited sample set we've collected.
[Citation needed.]
Until we have any actual evidence of life or intelligent life "elsewhere," we have absolutely no evidence that conditions "elsewhere" are sufficiently "favorable" for anything. It's all just speculation. The "sample set" is ONE instance, which is not statistically significant evidence for anything.
"Favorable" could be 1 in 10 planets, or it could be 1 in 100 quadrillion quadrillion. You can't conclude anything from a sample size of 1. (There's also not a lot of evidence AGAINST favorable conditions existing elsewhere, since we really can't know what "favorable conditions" are until we've enlarged our sample set, but that doesn't mean anything either.)