General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I've been fretting more and more about the Fermi Paradox [View all]Retrograde
(10,136 posts)H. sapiens has been around for 100,000 years, give or take a few millennia. We like to think we're pretty smart, managing to inhabit a wide range of climates and environments. But some societies, such as the ancient Australians, managed to make a good living for themselves and develop complex cultures and arts without some of the trappings we think of as "civilization". Even Europeans, whom a lot of people point to as being an "advanced" culture, didn't start figuring out the basics of chemistry and electricity until the 1800s. And understanding of nuclear physics and the ability to launch stuff into space is even later.
So IMHO it's quite possible that there are many forms of intelligent life out there but for what ever reason they're happily living their lives for whatever reasons with technologies that we'd consider primitive, and that we won't find unless we can get probes a whole lot closer.