>It could be that we're the first/only group to achieve sentience in the galaxy but the probability of that being true is astonishingly small. If life is extre

>It could be that we're the first/only group to achieve sentience in the galaxy but the probability of that being true is astonishingly small. If life is extremely rare, then that doesn't seem so unlikely. If life were so rare than on average, after 15 billion years, only one out of every trillion galaxies has life evolve, then every instance of intelligent life should see itself as being alone. I think people are too quick to write off the possibility that life really is this rare. I think people reason "if life were so rare, then I wouldn't be here to exist to think about it", but I don't think that's a correct way of thinking about it. If life is really that rare, then the rare instances of life could all think that same thought process too, and they'd clearly be wrong. Maybe if life is super rare, we should expect to find ourselves in a much older universe, but maybe this current age of the universe is actually more suitable for life than other times. (Some crazy hypothesizing: If you accept the many-worlds interpretation, maybe periods early in the history of the universe, before the universe has branched so many times, in some sense have more "measure", and so observers are more likely to find themselves here. This is definitely a more "out there" idea; I'm not hingeing anything off of this idea, but I think it's worth mentioning while thinking about the anthropic principle and fermi paradox. I'm also hesitant to give it too much weight since if branching happens uncountably many times every moment, then if this effect does apply, then I'd expect it to overwhelm almost everything else and we should expect to find ourselves at the absolutely earliest possible moment. Arguments about when we should find ourselves in history seem to always go weird -- see the Doomsday Argument.)