Where are the aliens?  I don't mean that as an idle interrogative from a long-time science fiction fan, but seriously - where the hell are they?

We can ask the Drake Equation, of course, and its variants.  Spend some time on Wikipedia to catch up if you don't know the reference.  The basic idea is that, mathematically, you would think the galaxy and the universe beyond should be teeming with life, enough of it intelligent and technical that it should be detectable by now.

Even at sub-light speeds, given the age of the universe, shouldn't we be decoding someone else's attempt at "Gilligan's Island," or finding a would-be lander, lost in space after their engineers couldn't tell the difference between the local varieties of inches and centimeters? 

For my money, it's not just that life should be out there, but it should be spreading.  Why, for instance, is there not a two million year old space elevator anchored at the equator that was long worshipped as a divine structure and only in the 20th century recognized as an artifact, one left behind by the genetic engineers that coded us?  (I discount tales of pyramids and ancient temples as examples, just as I discount UFOs as a real possibility of aliens.  If there had ever  been real aliens on Earth, we wouldn't be talking about a crashed craft hidden in Area 51, we would be studying the million year old solar arrays visible across the face of the moon, or the trade in stamped, thermoplastic composites that followed the silk road after the junking of giant space liner in ancient China.)

Today, why aren't there alien NGOs setting up shop to inoculate us against death, despair at our lack of intelligence, and fight with our greedy governments as they try to maintain some semblance of petty control?

Why?  Perhaps because intelligent life is exceedingly rare.  In fact, in the history of the universe, it hasn't happened yet.  We are hardly an example of a rational species.  By and large, we are emotional creatures.  Even those of us who have rational abilities above the norm (not a group in which I place myself), lead lives that are driven far more by the amygdala than the cerebral cortex.  The fact that we have developed any rational and technical abilities is breathtakingly, monstrously, against all odds.

I have no doubt that there is a great deal of life (bacterial) and even highly evolved life (sentient) throughout the universe.  But a smart cephalopod swimming beneath the darkness of an ice-covered sea is never going to learn how to deposit trace elements onto the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material to make an integrated circuit.  Nor would we ourselves without some amazing revolutions in thought that were neither obvious nor predestined.  Right now we could just as easily be living in a slave-burdened culture, worshipping the moon, and controlling the weather by human sacrifice as where we have actually ended up.  Sometimes it even seems half the population is hell-bent to take us in some similar direction.

So the most precious, unpredictable part of the equation may be that anything approaching rationality can appear in any species to any degree. Even now, in humans, it is a weak flame flickering against the darkness.  And I don't expect that we will stoke the fires of that evolution much beyond where it has already taken us.

What will happen instead is that we will soon design and give birth to our own successors, those silicon species, the infinite computers that will -for good or ill- not be burdened with our ancient, fiery, and highly illogical emotions.  Perhaps then the universe will have produced its first truly intelligent species.

That species, our non-carbon based children, will be the ones to spread out from Earth.  Slow or fast, they will reach out into the space between the stars, both exploring and, no doubt dominating to one degree or another.

It will be they who leave the great, undeniably alien structures to litter future galaxies.  It will be they who influence the lives and development of extra terrestrial species without number. 

Finally, it will be they who look back upon their own history and find it remarkable in the extreme that their very lives and intellects sprang (at first) from a million upon a million monkeys randomly striking at keyboards until the first clear thought came to comprehend and then, at last, encompass the universe.