Do you believe in aliens?

Another sacrilegious sounding technicality is that Jesus is a zombie.

The elusive Great Filter is only one potential solution to the Fermi paradox. I'm less inclined to subscribe to hypotheses widely prohibiting abiogenesis, subsequent development of intelligence coupled with anatomical means of utilizing said intelligence, or circumvention of apocalyptic scenarios erroneously judged to be absolute inevitabilities.

My own suspicions require a preface. Humans share roughly 18% of their genetic information with plants, 92% with all mammals, and as much as 99% with chimpanzees. While it's tempting to assert that the variance regards particularly critical genes, the incontrovertible reality is that the difference between the intelligence of the two animals is negligible and that human accomplishments and structures apparently contradicting that are in fact imperceptibly superior to impoundments constructed by beavers when viewed from further along the progression of intelligence.

Constantly confronted with the apparently bizarre and counterintuitive realm of quantum mechanics, the thought that humans are simply little more equipped to fully understand the universe than a chimpanzee is increasingly pervasive in my mind as an explanation for the peculiarities thereof. When humans search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, their speculations revolve around the Kardashev scale, which traditionally categorizes civilizations based on the extent of their ability to harness and manipulate energy. Humans are humble enough to admit they do not yet even rank on the scale, but unintentionally too arrogant to often consider that the scale was devised by said humans and quite possibly doesn't accurately describe the goals and motivations of higher intelligence.

Experiments such as the Miller-Urey experiment have demonstrated that amino acids form naturally. It's increasingly apparent that biology may be as natural of an expression of chemistry as chemistry is of physics. When this line of thinking is augmented with consideration of alternative-chirality biomolecules, consequent "anti-chiral" life utilizing D amino acids or L sugars, and even the possibility of non-carbon-based biochemistries such as those based on silicon and germanium, it becomes conceivable that the Drake equation actually offers an underestimation. Carl Sagan similarly coined bias against this line of thinking "carbon chauvinism" but we're in agreement that carbon-based life is likely the most common due to the chemical versatility and abundance of the element.

This reasoning paired with the prodigious nature of the universe indicates little to no room for the possibility that intelligence doesn't flourish here. Where is it? Humans likely don't know what to look for. It's unlikely that a species masters interstellar travel before reaching a technological singularity, a point after which speculation is nearly impossible. Indeed, humans seem much closer to reaching their own than to developing efficient interstellar travel independently. An intelligence perhaps both biologically and artificially redesigned from the ground up for maximum efficiency likely has motivations far beyond current human conceptualization altogether. I suspect its actions would be indistinguishable from nature from the human perspective or undetectable, extradimensional in its spatial and temporal qualities. That's if the usual protocol isn't to immediately outright escape the universe itself, possibly even in favor of designer universes tweaked to their preferences. After all, many of us have proposed eventually doing this anyway as a means of escaping the heat death of the universe, also known as the Big Freeze.

My conclusion is that extraterrestrial life existing in the intelligence range we generally propose is rare, that the natural gap between human-level intelligence and the next level is sufficient to render said level incomprehensible to humans, but that simpler life, microbial and beyond, is abundant and very detectable. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to detect atmospheric chemical disequilibrium, determining whether or not atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars are being modified by life.

Drake and Fermi forgot to add time to their equations.

Given an eternity or even just billions of years, the odds that two intellegent societies exist at any given same time in the universe is (forgive the pun) astronomically unlikely.

On earth we have gone through several great dyings in only thousands or millions of years.

The odds are not likely aliens exist at the same time as us.

Life, most likely. Intelligent life, doubtful.

Damn! You caught me. I was told that using the word "human" would be too obvious, but i didn't listen.

I have thought about that, however my view of the human race on the whole is not as negative as yours appears to be. And I don't think we are looking for life to be friends with them, I think its the mystery of it all thats appealing.