Thanks @Barney
I will check out that podcast!
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If you want to move beyond the big idea phase, this was actually expressed mathematically about 30 years before it was popularized as the Great Filter.
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I also learned about the Drake equation from that podcast @howard 
I donāt know anything apparently
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It was Greg Brady the whole timeā¦
(sorry non-USA or other-generationally challenged folks for the reference).
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An alien comes to Earth, and the first life form it encounters are some weeds. What did the alien say to the weeds?
āTake me to your weeder!ā
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I always feel the question of whether there is extraterrestrial life and UFOs, or not, rather amusing.
As has been said here, space is vast but so are the numbers representing things like the number of galaxies, stars, and planets in the whole universe.
As an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer I think that to believe we are the only planet in the whole universe capable of supporting intelligent life seems rather arrogant on our behalf. Especially when you consider we are talking about billions and billions of sources for possible life outside of the blue marble we call earth.
I would be more interested in knowing why governments will not acknowledge that we are not the be all to end all in the whole universe. I expect their stock answer to be that it would be a risk to national security or that humans just can not handle the truth.
I see that SETI was mentioned and am surprised MUFON was not.
On March 31, 2020, UC Berkeley stopped sending out new data for SETI@Home clients to process, ending the effort for the time being. I was part of that program. Whose bright idea was that, and why?
It would not surprise me to see MUFON suppressed at some point.
Here is a link to the MUFON website if you want to get further into this topic.
These are my opinions and mine alone, take from them what you will.
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You may have already heard this one:
What is the opposite of progress?
.
.
.
.
.
Congress.
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I kinda like it the way i heard it-
Group of crows-a murder
Group of lions -a pride
Group of dolphins-a pod
Group of self-obsessed, egotistical thieves-Congress
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If aliens donāt play bass, im not interested.
Maybe, more recent sitings are because theyāre trying to get access to our internet. So they can take the B2B course. Those would be wise aliens.
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Ha ! Aliens. I love this.
Pretty easy for me, but im a simple fellow.
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they real. But they are a long way out, and if they show up it wonāt be for a nice lunch and conversation. They would be an invading force set on colonization, subjugation or extermination. a mix of one or more of these doesnāt seem beyond logic.
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they real. But they are just as in the dark about interstellar uber rides as we are. so therefore they arenāt coming.
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they real. But they also real advanced and aināt fooling with us. ( this one actually seems the most plausible so far.)
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they aināt real. But they sure are a nice distraction. Nice little piece of subterfuge and misdirection-penn and teller styleā¦which leads me back to the subject of Congressš
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The scariest thing Iāve ever read about aliensā¦
What if they are just like us.
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Oh. Oh my. That was truly scary. I donāt want to go down that rabbit hole. Thereās nothing good going on there.
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What did E.T.'s mom say to him when he got home?
āWhere on Earth have you been?ā
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Except thereās no reason to believe that we arenāt and thereās statistical evidence to suggest that not only are we the only intelligence in our galaxy, thereās a good chance weāre the only ones in the entire universe.
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Can you point me to a link with these statistics?
Not being argumentative, I really would like to see the stats.
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Just so weāre no stuck on that word āstatisticsā, we only have statistics for not finding intelligent life so anything that suggests itās out there is a probability equation/modelā¦ hereās the study:
ā6 Conclusion
We have seen that a Fermi paradox arises if we combine a high and extremely
confident prior for the number of civilizations in our galaxy with the absence
of evidence for their existence. The high confidence that causes this clash typically results from applying a Drake-like model using point estimates for the
parameters. These estimates, however, make implicit knowledge claims about
processes (especially those connected with the origin of life) which are untenable
given the current state of scientific knowledge.
When we take account of realistic uncertainty, replacing point estimates by
probability distributions that reflect current scientific understanding, we find no
reason to be highly confident that the galaxy (or observable universe) contains
other civilizations, and thus no longer find our observations in conflict with our
prior probabilities. We found qualitatively similar results through two different
methods: using the authorsā assessments of current scientific knowledge bearing
on key parameters, and using the divergent estimates of these parameters in the
astrobiology literature as a proxy for current scientific uncertainty.
When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a
substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our
observable universe (53%ā99.6% and 39%ā85% respectively). āWhere are they?ā
ā probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological
horizon and forever unreachable.ā
Also, the Fermi paradox has little to do with Fermi and isnāt a paradox.
Proving that aliens donāt exist is like trying to prove that a drug is safe, only significantly harder.
We only have one data point, that we exist; that really is not enough to suggest that there must be more.
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Yeah. I was always quite amused by how freely some of the estimates assigned ā1.0ā to some of the life and intelligence related terms of the Drake equation based on exactly one data point that we all have affinity bias towards 
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I reckon it would be one of those theramin things 
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