just more ads for ED cures.

You are a strange species, not like any other, and you would be surprised how many there are, Intelligent but savage.

for anything but low power, local communication.

There are billions of stars in the universe with trillions of celestial bodies that could harbor some sort of biological life. However, unless there is a way to bridge the massive distances between us and our cosmically minute lifespans, we are effectively alone.

Hmm, 8 billion light years away, we might get an answer in 16 billion years? I'll wait

According to My Son The Astronomer, there's a consensus that we might well be the first technological civilization in our galaxy.

There are a lot of other things to understand. One is, how vast interstellar distances are. The term "light years" is not a casual dismissal of time and space. It tells you how very far apart things are. If we could travel at 99.9% of light speed (c), it would still take four years to get to that nearest star. And travelling that fast isn't remotely possible at this point. I think My Son The Astronomer told me recently that our fastest rockets simply don't register as a percentage of light speed.

Oh, and you need to think about the cosmic radiation out there. Yeah, it's real and very dangerous. The faster you travel, the more cosmic radiation you get in that time. Most of it will kill you. Read How to Die in Space by Paul M. Sutter.

It's highly possible that interstellar travel will never be possible. Okay, so perhaps some kind of shielding against that radiation will be developed. We'll still be limited by c. We can only go so far in a human lifetime.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading novels that have us travelling throughout the galaxy at much faster than speed of light.

Those who blithely assume that there are civilizations out there vastly older than us, who have visited and continued to visit, just don't understand.

Getting a good answer to questions like this always depends on being specific about what exactly one is asking.

It’s highly probable that we are alone, in the sense of being able to communicate in real time (or within our lifetimes) with other intelligent life in the universe. The distances to other galaxies… or even almost all other stars in our own galaxy… dictate this.

The probability of other intelligent life in the universe is very high, IMO. There are just too many billions of galaxies out there that make it nearly impossible that intelligent life HASN’T evolved somewhere. But we’ll never know; the distances are just too great.

And that all is neglecting the fact that we don’t yet know how to communicate with other life forms on our own planet. We assume they aren’t intelligent, but there is a lot of evidence suggesting otherwise. They are here but we can’t communicate with them… so is the fact that we feel alone a problem of our own making?