Anthony Cerrato wrote:

"John Schilling" <schillin@spock.usc.edu> wrote:

Either we're the first, or something highly wierd is going on.  Wouldn't
be the first time the universe has thrown high wierdness at us, but the
high wierdness doesn't fall to obvious explanations like "the universe is
too big".

Maybe there isn't one single obvious explanation, but that's
exactly the problem. There also may not be anything exactly
obvious at all, but there are many, many perfectly
_logical_ scenarios that would work--that's the problem:
there are just too many to pick out just one or two. Instead
we can only list a whole  menu of possible choices, and say,
"pick one or more of the above!" And even that is still not
good enough, because one then has to add, "or pick a few in
one particular galactic era, and add a few others in another
era, etc etc.--i.e., take full account of the
psycho-socio-history factors directing the statistical
rises, and the declines and falls of intelligent
civilizations, and calculate some central tendency for their
distribution and lifetimes within the galaxy due to said
(and other unknown) factors. In the end, one is left with
almost complete uncertainty as to what the answers are to
Drake and Fermi's questions. But the answers are out there!
Jes not so easy to deduce!              ...tonyC

I still say the obvious answer is the right answer.

We can be sure they are out there somewhere (perhaps nowhere close, not even
within many hundreds of light years) because the universe is so big, and
cosmically speaking our galaxy, our star and our planet are nothing
extraordinary. So to think we are the only intelligent life in the universe
runs counter all the growing evidence that the Earth is of no special
significance.

The reason they aren't here (or haven't been heard from) because the
universe is so big.

It is the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts.

-- 
Tony Sivori