I am admittedly not that old, but I have been finding it interesting how much the discussion of aliens has changed over the past decade or two. When I was younger, the idea of believing in aliens of any kind just generally seemed absurd to people; if anyone ever mentioned they thought there might be other forms of life out there, people just seemed to think they were crazy.
Nowadays, however, the opinion seems to have flipped; a lot of people generally seem to accept the idea that life likely exists, did exist, or will exist in some form or another somewhere in space, even if its just microscopic or bacterial in nature. Maybe it’s just due to how much our knowledge of space has changed over the years - heck, we didn’t even have official scientific confirmation that there were exoplanets until the 1990s. The first ever real picture of a blackhole was only taken in 2019! - but I think it’s pretty neat either way. Not everyone believes, but it feels like its been a long time since the default reaction to “what if there’s something out there” was just to laugh at someone.
Personally - I don’t know. I think it’s equally likely that we may be the first, or that intelligent life develops so rarely and with such difficulty that the odds of contact are (almost?) zero, or that anything out there may be too far away for us to find anytime soon, and that even if we did find something, it may be nearly impossible to make actual contact due to environmental factors. Who knows? As they say - the possibility will likely seem impossible right up until it actually happens.
Mostly, however, I like to think (in an optimistic, humorous kind of way) that we’re just wildly ahead of the curve. Maybe we’ll make contact with some other civilization one day, and find out they just weren’t as interested in going fast like we were, and it took them hundreds of years to even leave their atmosphere, while humans were sitting over here going from ‘first powered flight’ to ‘aerial warfare’ to ‘break the sound barrier’ to ‘land on the moon’ and ‘commercial airtravel’ in… checks notes less than 70 years. I think it would be incredibly funny if one day our descendants had to explain to aliens that yes, we did want to go fast, and yes, we did strap ourselves to combustion rockets to do it. “What’s wildly unsafe” says everyone else. “But it was fast”, says humans, the species that evolved by standing upright to go 0.2x times faster than they were moving before.
