The Question:
The universe is big, really big after all. So big and so old relative to our human lifespan that the lack of any other known intelligent life puzzles us. There is only one beginning to grand civilizations. Should we not question the fact that we are the only known life form?

This thought experiment is commonly known as the "Fermi Paradox".

The story goes that in 1950 Enrico Fermi and his colleagues were discussing the existence of alien life over lunch. The question that Fermi asked the table became infamous in its simplicity: “Where is everybody?” The room fell silent because, well, nobody had an answer. Originally, the question was meant to attack the idea of interstellar travel, the possibility of which Fermi wasn’t confident in. But the question remains: if there were civilizations scattered across the stars by the billions, why haven’t we heard from them? It is from these questions, the Drake equation, and the Kardashev scale that the true paradox was born. The Milky Way is about 10 billion years old and 100,000 light-years across. If aliens had spaceships that could travel at 1 percent of the speed of light, the galaxy could have already been colonized 1,000 times. Why haven’t we heard from any other life? That very question is the Fermi paradox. It has sparked numerous explanations for the silence we’ve been experiencing. Some scientists think that the silence is the product of something they’ve coined the Great Filter, an evolutionary wall impermeable to most life. For these scientists, there are two basic possibilities regarding the Great Filter: it’s either behind us or in front of us. If it’s behind us, scientists have speculated that it may have occurred at the creation of life itself or at the jump from single-cell prokaryotes to multicell eukaryotes. Either way, it implies that we are a rare case and that communication isn’t happening because we’re one of very few, if any, survivors. If the Great Filter is ahead of us, on the other hand, then we’re not receiving communication because advanced civilizations have hit the wall and ceased to exist—implying that we too will hit that wall eventually. Other scientists have come up with other explanations for this literal radio silence. Perhaps most of the universe is colonized and communicating, but we’re stuck in a desolate area far from the action.

Or maybe highly advanced civilizations simply don’t care about communicating with inferior life like us. If they have all the power of an entire galaxy, maybe they can’t be bothered by us and our handheld cell phones.

When thinking about this question we are essentially thinking about a bag of indefinite size filled with an indefinite amount of marbles each one representing one origin story for our current conscious existence and realizing that a majority of conscious beings alive now would be able to observe alien life.

And what a time to be alive! We are undergoing an exponential rate of change in all fields of science. Our rate of change is evolving, and it's becoming clear that by the end of this century life will reach into new deeper depths of what early man could only describe as ‘magic’. This is known as the “knee of the curve” as described by Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near. The graph below taken from the book gives deeper insight to this sentiment.