(November 3, 2014 at 4:20 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: It doesn't have to be special. You have to know what the odds are for the state of affairs we observe to be remarkable. You don't know the odds, so you have no basis for claiming that we should have detected another civilization by now.
How could we ever hope to detect other civilizations anyway?
We're looking at things as they were thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of years ago. Unless Einstein had it all wrong, we could never hope to reach distant systems. And the same applies to every other possible civiization.
The best we can hope for is to detect planets where life is possible.