or even if only 1 in 100,000 does, I acknowledge that that's still a lot of advanced intelligent life out there, even in "just" our galaxy alone. But it might also mean that the closest star with intelligent life orbiting it is the 1,000th nearest to us, not the 3rd or 10th or 15th nearest. Reducing greatly our chances of ever communicating with them, much less one life form ever actually encountering the other.
Which is a bummer. But the distances just defy living physical matter crossing them.
Towards the center of our or any galaxy the distances between stars become less and less. But interstellar turbulence also increases dramatically and the likelihood of life lasting very long before one's planet suffers life-extinguishing events becomes low.
I agree that less intelligent intelligent life probably frequently annihilates itself.
Whereas sufficiently intelligent life surely has no particular need to interact with us anyway. How much actual need do we have to talk to dolphins, or gorillas? Or ants?
And if very advanced life doesn't want us to detect them, then I expect we aren't going to be able to.
As for other-dimensional life... even if that exists we of course have no clue how to detect it.
l'm aware this sounds quite pessimistic. But in spite of it all I'm very hopeful about the James Webb telescope scheduled to go up I think next year. I believe it will offer reasonable prospects for finding biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets.
And a Mars lander in the pipeline should be able to search for microbes several feet down in that planet's soil... which is where they're likely to be if they exist on Mars.
These are the most exciting times ever, to date, in mankind's search for alien life.
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