What kind of reasoning is appropriate to understand the as of today unanswered question of whether there are (other) interstellar space travelling civilizations in the Milky Way?
We have already sent probes towards the border of the Solar system. And even landed human beings on another celestial body and brought them home alive and well. If we extrapolate the 50 years of space travel, the 100 years of electronics (radio), the 400 years of physical science, to just a fraction of the biological age of humankind into the future (like a few thousands of years), interstellar travel is not out of the question for us or at least our artefacts. So I imagine two possible alternatives:
1) The Milky Way is cluttered by lots of space travelling civilizations like us and our future. Once one of them/us gets going, they'll soon be everywhere. The Sun orbits the Milky Way every 250 million years, about 2% of the age of the galaxy. Going to the nearest stars is enough to soon be everywhere. But if they are everywhere since almost always, they should be here, we should be their seed.
2) We are the only space travelling civilization in the entire galaxy, ever. But then what makes us unique? We consist of the most common elements and volatiles of the universe and our planet and star and galactic location all seem to be very typical. There's no known trace of any uniqueness here. Whatever could it be?
Are there more alternatives?
While we cannot say today which alternative is true, we should be able to at least specify the possible alternatives. But to me they all seem to be absurd! What would be a rational logical scientific approach to this apparent paradox?
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