You are falling into the a logic trap. Being aware of something as incredibly unlikely, you conclude it is incredibly unlikely.

Consider this: I design computer networking protocols - how machines talk to each other. Often, people designing such protocols ignore network communication errors because they believe (rightly) that they are so rare it isn't worth the effort of augmenting the protocol to get around them. Further, the network itself has error recovery in it. But I can't disbelieve in failures.

So - the likelihood that any single message sent on the net gets lost is around 1 in 10 billion. But in the systems I design, there are typically 10,000 to 100,000 users. In such systems, the likelihood that somebody experiences a communication failure is so high, that it happens around once every hour, or about 25 times a day. My customers do not accept my excuse that the chances of a failure are 1 in 10 billion. Failures happen all day long, every day.

What's my point of this story?

Consider a billion galaxies, each with a billion stars. Are we the only intelligent life in all of that? Doesn't seem so. Just as somebody loses a network messages every hour, so does the universe produce a new intelligent species EVERY HOUR.

What are the odds that a single person experiences two failures in the same day? Astonishingly low. Yet 25 such failures happen every day.

What are the odds that a single planet produces two intelligent species in the same million years? Astonishingly low, and indeed we are the only such species on our planet. Yet, around the universe, 25 such species are produced every day.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)