I don´t think technological innovation is like a straight line going upwards. I expect that the more we know and the more we can do, the more effort it will eventually take to go further. Just like the faster a car goes, the more energy it takes to make it go even faster. A car with 10.000nm of torque will probably not go thát much faster than the fastest cars we have these days.

I can't help but laugh a bit at "utterly impossible", steely..i mean we are here, are we not?

I don't see why one would be so against the idea that if basic life is common in the universe there is a chance it may lead to intelligent life. I mean think about it- we went from animal to something intelligent in a extremely small span of geological time. The blink of an eye, essentially. We have no idea how biology works on a cosmic scale.. but if we knew there was 'basic life' common on planets, would it really be so outrageous to think that it might evolve in a way similar to life on this planet? since its the only planet with basic life that we've studied so far? I mean, we can see tons of similarities between the ways different cosmic processes unfold..like how galaxies form and evolve..same with stars, moons, planets, ect ect..

This is just part of the reason i sometimes think its ridiculously counter-intuitive and even arrogant, in a sense, to just flat out assume that we are the only intelligent species in this universe. It rings like some weird pessimistic offshoot of the geocentric model that put the earth as the center of the universe..and anyone who said otherwise was a heretic

The bottom line- we don't know. It's fun to speculate though without asserting your own view as 'how it really is'.. Personally i highly doubt we are the only intelligent species in the universe..i don't think we are so special. It seems much more likely to me that there is many intelligent species in the universe, and probably some in this galaxy as well.. I mean we've already found other planets that seem to have the conditions necessary for life to thrive, and our conservative parameters for the conditions of life (among other things) are always being stretched by surprising discoveries (like the arsenic-dna thing). We also recently discovered there are 3 times the amount of stars in the universe than previously thought, increasing the odds for life 3-fold.. Stars recently have been found to actually create organic matter ...and other stars have been found spewing out actual H20..there's almost all the ingredients for life right there coming from stars

Not to mention that the planets that we have seen in our own galaxy are just a TINY few out of the billions that probably exist, and that's JUST in our galaxy..which is needless to say just ONE galaxy out of over 200 BILLION +..so that is literally trillions upon trillions of planets..and that's JUST in our universe. Even physicists these days are theorizing about a multiverse, since some claim the evidence calls for this (Its no longer just the crazy psychonauts/mystics i guess ). but i'm getting to fringe material..Although i do remember some mathematician/astronomer coming up with an equation that tried to calculate the probability of other life existing in the universe and it was basically 100%

I think western science, partly as a retaliation against years of suppression from religions, generally tends to push the idea that the universe is some big blind happy accident and we are an extremely rare and meaningless by-product of an extremely rare and meaningless universe..and as a result many become hostile at the idea of nature showing signs of being an intelligent process, or the idea that intelligent life exists elsewhere. Even if that's the case and its all meaningless and we are alone, i'm still grateful for every breath and it doesn't take away any of the magic of existence..but to me that idea just doesn't sound convincing at all.. especially when considering the scale of the universe, and the anecdotal psychedelic data on this.