1) One can use exoplanet data to modify Drake equation and ask: How bad must the odds of civilization-making be for Humans to be the only one in all cosmic history?

Answer: 1 in 10 billion trillion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html https://twitter.com/bob_dueck/status/1254255703637651456

2) I note that sometimes people criticize this as "playing with numbers" but that tack ignores the long history for work and debate on limiting exactly that probability.

3) Our result showed: as long as the probability for creating a civilization on a randomly chosen habitable-zone planet was greater than 10^(-22), then what's happened here has happened elsewhere.

That turns out to make most of the pessimists in the literature optimists!

4) Note this does not mean anyone is out there now (sorry UFO fans). The civilization lifetime is not in our Drake eq formulation. There may have been trillions of high-tech civilizations that only lasted 1000 years.

5) But from my perspective, our results puts the onus on the pessimists to show why evolutionary processes would be so biased against the formation of civilizations as to yield a per planet probability lower than 1 in ten billion trillion.