[yedawg]

We are here, so why can't aliens exist, right? I don't think it's as simple as the drake equation suggests. There are trillions of variables that life on earth has had to overcome with relative success. Even this is abstract and is in turn subjective. I speculate that if we repeatedly redefine our assumptions on how unlikely it is for life to arise in our part of the universe, we still only have a potential baseline for life in the milky way; this is again skewed by our position in the solar system and cannot be reasonably accounted for by an algorithm. (We don't know what we can't test)