What do we mean by alone?
Life isn't this "magical" force.
Life is just an outcome which is just incredibly rare. Or maybe its not? Maybe we are just too primitive in the sense that we haven't analyzed all planets (like this planet is just 120 light years away, still huge but still, who knows how this search continues, and maybe we can even find more/maybe advanced species as well?
But also, as others have pointed out. I think that getting to civilisation level is pretty rare. Its not like the signs on this life that we have found automatically means that they are one day going to be a civilization level life. They may or may not & so many other comments above this comment have beautifully shown the amount of rarity in that which was the major takeaway from this HN atleast for me.
Its still just so fascinating how human societies exist. Maybe I am pessimistic, but like we believe in gold because everyone else does, but for the first time ever, Imagine the people who started trusting in gold and started trading in gold.
They couldn't eat gold, For all its worth, they might have thought that its just shiny rock and its abundant, we just haven't discovered it yet and its going to be worthless so we might as well use grains.
But such trust in gold,maybe even religion/ general trust on society structure beyond the people you know directly is just so bizarre.
People believing and dying for nations made those nations have power. And now we trust those nations and their power because our ancestors said so & taught us so.
I have read sapiens book 4-5 years ago and I think I had never wondered about such things until now.
Our ancestors could change things way more radically. They had such freedom.
Voltaire used his reason to pursuade people for a revolution.
I am not sure, but in the vastness of the internet, people have just stopped caring about reason but rather all they care about is authority. Change fears so many people.
People would know that some things are bad yet just because they exist, they think it as something so highly and won't even conceive of the possibility of fixing it. And others would be peer pressured into we can't change it. And the people who want change would be ridiculed and made fun of. So much of the time, reason falls off on dead ears in today's world & emotions are hijacked by echo chambers.
Much of our society(I can't say nobody,because I would do grave injustice to people who reason) wants to reason because we want the comfort of emotion.