This article prompted me to reconsider my presumption of the inevitability of a vast number of intelligent life in our proximity of, what, a few hundred light years. Nature continually builds and destroys, everything. We will likely go extinct as a result of natural forces, and I would argue that global warming is a natural force even if we have precipitated it. We're a force of nature, after all.

With reference to one of your earlier postings in which I believe you mentioned that if we had visitors, you would expect them to be AI, I now see why that makes sense. Perhaps an intelligent species could survive long enough to build self-sustaining AI capable of exploring. In fact it would have to explore to harvest materials for tune-ups and such. I imagine one's plugs and points get pretty fried on inter-stellar travel.

And getting back to the infinite nature of the big mega super duper universe, such AI would, by definition, exist in infinite numbers, but it would also perhaps exist in denser numbers, more AI hot rods per universe, whereas actual life capable of traveling hundreds of thousand, millions, of light years (and through various wimpy big bang universes) would be far less common, although still infinite in total.