Especially since the likeliest outcome is either the universe is far more inhospitable than we can imagine, and we're extremely extremely lucky that life on earth wasn't evaporated many times over, or it's the inevitable outcome that intelligent species destroy themselves before they venture out from their own planet. Yeah, basically any explanation is going to be grim.
the most likely outcome is the first. the conditions to develop multi-cellular life forms are very specific and difficult to obtain. no reason to assume anything else.
When you look at the history of Earth, single celled life evolved pretty much as soon as we had liquid water. Multiple cellular complex creatures didn't until something like .5 billion years ago (versus 3.5 billion years of single celled creatures). Even today, most of the carbon being used by life is in single celled creatures or plants/fungus. By biomass, animals are very tiny (like less than 0.5% is in animals most is in plants and over 10% is in tiny single celled things). If you're just counting in terms of copies of genes on the planet, I think single celled life is still winning lol. You have to go through a long circuitous path to get to intelligence and technology that evolution really has no reason to pick other than chance.
Especially since the likeliest outcome is either the universe is far more inhospitable than we can imagine, and we're extremely extremely lucky that life on earth wasn't evaporated many times over, or it's the inevitable outcome that intelligent species destroy themselves before they venture out from their own planet. Yeah, basically any explanation is going to be grim.
the most likely outcome is the first. the conditions to develop multi-cellular life forms are very specific and difficult to obtain. no reason to assume anything else.
When you look at the history of Earth, single celled life evolved pretty much as soon as we had liquid water. Multiple cellular complex creatures didn't until something like .5 billion years ago (versus 3.5 billion years of single celled creatures). Even today, most of the carbon being used by life is in single celled creatures or plants/fungus. By biomass, animals are very tiny (like less than 0.5% is in animals most is in plants and over 10% is in tiny single celled things). If you're just counting in terms of copies of genes on the planet, I think single celled life is still winning lol. You have to go through a long circuitous path to get to intelligence and technology that evolution really has no reason to pick other than chance.