[moe]

That’s not human arrogance. That’s just how it looks to be at the moment.

Human arrogance I say (and that is not aimed at you personally).

We're making assumptions based on a ridiculously small and sparse amount of knowledge. We assume the universe is 14 billion years old, we assume other lifeforms are carbon based like us and evolve the same way we do, we assume faster-than-light travel is not possible.

I don't see how this is any different to how we assumed the earth is flat, just a few hundred years ago.

In the grand scheme of things we simply don't know enough to make anything but the wildest guesses about alien intelligent life. Considering ourselves to be the pinnacle of evolution at this point seems very naive.

[manicbovine]

It's much different from assuming a flat earth. There has always been good and readily available data supporting the hypothesis of a non-flat earth. Various cultures have used this data to realize that the earth is not flat.

Our dataset about life is ostensibly limited to earth-based life. If we abandon available data, we are limited to making wild untestable conjectures.

What is the alternative? Should we just stop thinking about it?

[ugh]

Nobody assumes that humans are any kind of pinnacle of evolution. I never said that, the submission never said that. There is a difference between “most life out there is probably microbes” and “all life except for life on Earth is microbes”.

It’s a wild guess (astrophysicists would take exception, however, with the assertion that they got the age of the universe wrong) but it’s also the best we have. And there is nothing wrong with that and it is not arrogance.