Took a stroll through Google asking how many habitable planets are in our one galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. Not the whole Universe, just our little galaxy, and the estimates range from one billion to 60 billion habitable planets.
This wide range of guesses is caused by Ignorance, for one, because no one really knows. Also because what one scientist calls “habitable”, another calls uninhabitable. A lot of advanced life forms on Earth live in conditions we couldn’t survive.
The average of the guesses is 30, of course, and 30 billion is still a lot of Earths. No Earth is going to be sterile, they’ll all have developed life forms on them. We did, way back when conditions for life here were terrible for life. Life is tenacious and persistent so let’s take it as a given, just for drill, that there’s 30 billion Earths in our galaxy with advanced life forms.
That doesn’t mean they’re all intelligent, but the longer life evolves on a planet, the more intelligent it becomes. If you want a reference to validate that, try Earth. So of those 30 billion, it’s reasonable that most of them have either highly intelligent critters on them or have wiped themselves out with wars.
Now, our galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy, and will begin merging with it in 4 or 5 billion years, long after humanity has come and gone. It also probably has many billions of advanced life forms today but probably none will be left by the time the galaxies begin merging.
AND MY POINT IS, life is common, life is short, and from a distance we must look like a bunch of red and black ants busy killing each other and everything else we can attack. We don’t matter to anything. Only to our tiny little selves and it’s GOOD to step back once in a while and have a little humility. We aren’t alone, there’s billions of other races, exploring the cosmos, expanding, evolving, decaying and dying, and the passage of time will erase us all.
Importance is all in the mind.