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How can we possibly understand the chances of extra-terrestrial life when we haven't gone out to look for it?
Everyone seems to assume their presence would be obvious to us in the form of visual emissions, Dyson swarms being built. But we don't know what that looks like and cannot really tell a dyson swarm from ordinary interstellar dust that covers a star. We cannot go interstellar to actually check what's happening even a few star systems away, never mind the whole galaxy or observable universe.
There's no way to predict what advanced methods and principles a powerful civilization has access to. Spin up a supercomputer the size of the moon, a particle accelerator that goes all the way around the solar system, run them for a thousand years - I think there would be some major physics advances. Maybe the aliens aren't interested in Dyson Spheres and are doing things with 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' instead. The latter are significantly more important than all the matter we have any understanding of.
It's far too early to estimate the chances of alien civilizations.
You can't plan on reliably detecting an entity much more powerful than you, who you've never knowingly encountered before and have no idea at all what it looks like, purely by looking at 2% of the possible habitat via telescopes with such poor resolution that they struggle to even find planets past a certain range, let alone discerning much about them. And even our knowledge of the planets is very weak. Only certain young, massive exoplanets are obvious to us, we can crudely guess the chemical composition of some nearby gas giants. No hypothesis can rest upon such weak investigative ability.
https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/
We've found about one in a million planets we expect to exist!
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