[jhedwards]

This doesn't seem like the right calculation to me. Doing some quick lookups, I find that the number of galaxies in the universe is estimated to be between 200 billion and 2 trillion. As for stars in a galaxy, there are around 100 billion stars in the milky way galaxy, so lets go with that.

If we guess that only about a quarter of any given galaxy is potentially habitable, that leaves 25 billion possibilities per galaxy. If we go with that and a middling estimate for the number of galaxies then we have maybe (25 billion * 1 trillion) stars, which is a number so big I don't even know how to say or comprehend it.

Even if we take an extremely conservative view that each galaxy only has at most 25 stars with potentially habitable planets (cutting the 1/4 galaxy estimate down by a factor of one BILLION) then we are still left with 25 trillion possibilities, which seems like a pretty good chance to me.

[fragmede]

Aka Drake's equation, with sufficiently large numbers, gives a decent chance of habitability. We just don't know what the numbers really are. Those big enough numbers with small enough other names make for a low enough number that it might as well be zero since we can't observe or interact with them.

[lowbloodsugar]

Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is...