Recent studies suggest there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. That works out to roughly 8 billion galaxies with intelligent life. There are u

Recent studies suggest there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. That works out to roughly 8 billion galaxies with intelligent life. There are untold trillions more galaxies beyond our observable horizon. Intelligence may be scattered sparsely, but there's probably a lot of it in absolute terms. Maybe in some corner of the universe two intelligent civilizations arose in the same galaxy, within a few tens of light years from each other. What is lonelier, having no other intelligence for millions of light years, or knowing there's another civilization tantalizingly close, but still far enough to make the possibility of in-person contact daunting under known laws of physics.