Do you believe there are species that have mastered FTL travel?

[GreenStormCloud]

92. You misapply the anthropic principle.

The shape of the puddle may be determined by local conditions, but the existance of a puddle at all is determined by universal conditions. For the puddle to exist there needs to be liquid, gravity, and a solid body.

For us to look like we do and have the characteristics that we do is determined by conditions on earth, that is true. But some things are needed for us to exist at all and are shared by any other life form that exists. Our moon appears to have played a vital role in making complex life possible.

For one thing, the moon keeps the insides of the earth in motion which brings uranium to the surface, making our planet mildly radioactive. That speeds up evolution by creating lots of mutations for evolution to work on. Without that, evolution would move at a much slower pace.

There are lots of other things about earth that are uncommon that are vital for complex life to even exist. When those things are combined, the odds for technological life become extremely small.

One of those things appears to be just plain luck. There are lots of events that can wipe out all life on a planet and we have been lucky enough to for the past 3.5 billion years to avoid hqaving to go back to "start". We haven't been hit by a really big astroid/comet, or fried by a gamma-ray burst from a hyper-nova, or had a nearby star go super-nova.

It increasingly looks like we are winners of a cosmological lottery.