>>694938I mean, isn't your thesis obvious to anyone intelligent enough to read /leftypol, OP?
From one side, since universe is [almost certainly] spatially infinite, there must be an infinite number of inhabited planets in it, no matter how insanely rare inhabited planets can be.
From other side, inhabited [by civilisations] planets ARE insanely rare. From what we can observe, there are no more than, like, a handful of civilisations per galaxy, and ZERO other-than-humanity civilisations in a thousand light years radius from Earth. Combine it with the fact that our universe doesn't appear to permit FTL travel, and you would reasonably conclude that humans would never meet aliens… unless you couunt truly sapient AI or something as an alien.