Hell no!
Big Universe, short (relative) effort.
Perhaps it’s a bit like winning the super lotto. You never will. Many people will.
A thought occurred to me. We know that life can exist on Earth, but as far as we know it only ever began once. Everything that exists today evolved from some archaebacteria that came into existance billions of years ago. That suggest that, even under ideal conditons, life-creating events can easily be billions of years apart.
I wouldn’t be surprised if each life-bearing planet were limited to a single dominant form of life. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t multiple attempts at life and what we are now is a combination of various survivors.
This is a good point. Even given generous odds, and life like ours formed on a planet with similar attributes, and eventually sentient beings with technology existed, why should we project human traits like exploring or an interest in space travel? The chances are just as good that space travel and life on other planets never occurred to them, and their world was wiped-out by a gamma-ray burst a billion years ago, and we’ll never know it.
Not quite… Life might have begun on earth at the very earliest instant it could have, once asteroids stopped falling and the seas stopped boiling. It might only have taken a million years for it to happen.
Also, once life gets started, it competes with non-living material which might, itself, go on to form life. The sheep, so to speak, gnaw the entire hillside bare. This is especially true once photosynthesis took off and changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Right now (many suggest) life couldn’t form, because the air is too rich with oxygen, which would tear apart delicate pre-living molecules.
(Also…I’m citing stuff I’ve read or was taught some fifteen or twenty years ago. The scientific consensus may have changed!)
If the chances are ‘just as good’ that any random civilisation will not develop space travel, that suggests that civilisations can be sorted into two roughly equal sets, the space-faring ones and the stay-at-homes. If there are more than two alien civilisations in our galaxy the there is a good chance that at least one of them will try to colonise the other stars. Increase the number of hypothetical civilisations and the odds increase.
If we want to believe that there are many alien civilisations in the galaxy but none of them have ever embarked on expansion, then we must assume that expansion is either a very unpopular choice or almost never succeeds. Given just one successful exponentiating wave of expansion in the last 13 billion years, we would know the answer to the Fermi Paradox, since we’d read about it in our history books.
Not really, since life also appeared really quickly after the earth cooled enough for it. The more likely explanation is that once one form of life establishes itself new types of life can’t appear, because anything that starts developing in the direction of life gets eaten before it can actually become life.
It’s a reasonable assumption, but as Mijin points out below, it doesn’t really help, thanks to time. We know how long conditions like those in our solar system could have existed. We’re not exactly latecomers, but there should be many others that predated ours by a few billion years. If anyone has actual numbers for this, I’d love to hear them. IIRC, the main requirement is a supernova and then time for its remains to collect into new solar-systems. Without the supernova we don’t have heavy elements. Yet we see supernovas from quite a distance away (in other galaxies).
In “Power, Sex, and Suicide” Nick Lane makes a good argument against this. If you’ve read it, I’d appreciate your insights. If not, I bet you’d enjoy it.
In any case, it took over 3 billion years for it to happen the first time, so it’s clearly not something that happens every day. Also, there’s a big difference between assimilating an organism into an organelle, and creating a eukaryote. By the latter, I mean a cell that’s capable of creating complex multicellular organisms, and it takes more than mere organelles and a nucleus to do that.
Right. But it’s also possible that any sufficiently advanced species quickly finds out that it’s unwise to advertise! 
The Drake equation is way cool, but doesn’t really help much with actual numbers, because it’s a long string of terms, and we only know a small fraction of them. One might as well estimate the volume of a polyhedron given only one side.
I can imagine a world where it would make sense to believe in a deity; one where interaction with said deity is commonplace. But I have to admit I might still wonder if God is jiving us!
When we do achieve it, will that have any impact on your opinion?
Furthermore, when one has only one data point, one’s confidence in probability estimates is very low! Especially when there’s no decent mathematical model for what we’re trying to calculate stats about.