What do you think about aliens?

[Mister Agenda]

I think alien people are vanishingly rare, and that we are likely the only technological civilization in our galaxy, and possibly the only one in our galactic cluster. Many of the exoplanets we've detected could harbor life, but people are another matter. Eukaryotes with mitochondria were a leap that might be far from inevitable since it was very likely based on ingesting something that could survive to become a symbiont. Our proportionately very large moon had a lot to do with the path evolution took on Earth, including protecting us from meteorites and accelerating the transition for sea to land-based life. I would be a little surprised if there's not another technological civilization anywhere else in the entire universe; but I wouldn't be surprised at all if we never find an independently-evolved invertebrate in the next million years. There's a good chance we're an Elder Race ™. If we survive long enough, our galaxy could become much more lively, but it will be derived from Earth-life spread by us.