> 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must ha

> 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around. "Must" is an extremely strong word to use for something with entirely unknown probability. There is absolutely no basis to calculate a probability of life existing at all (except to say that it is >0, since we exist), and intelligence is many more steps above that. The full extent of what we can say with any kind of certainty at all about intelligent life is that the probability of it existing outside Earth is non-0. Basically anything else is wild speculation. I'll also add that discussing time across the entire universe is meaningless, as we know from special relativity. An event in another galaxy that is outside our light hyper-cone has no time-like relation to our own history. A civilization in a galaxy that's 1M light years away from us can be seen as concurrent with us by some observers, can be seen as existing in our distant past by other observers (up to 1M years ago), or in our distant future by yet others (up to 1M years in our future).