>>11185948>30% (tens of billions of planets) not having life on it is a large enough sample set to extrapolate over the entire galaxy.This is incredibly wrong. You have no idea of the odds of abiogenesis. Hence you cannot extrapolate from simple percentages. Maybe our galaxy is the odd one out and should have many hundreds of planets with life, but it has only 3 planets with life and ooops we chose the wrong 30% to look for it. Or maybe abiogensis is extremely rare and only 1 galaxy in a billion has life, either scenario is still equally plausible from simply excluding 30%... A very simplistic counterexample that shows we cannot extrapolate from "30%"
>Especially as the 30% cone where we scan things will contain all types of stars and exoplanets. It is a large enough sample set to make generalizations about the rest of the galaxy (and most likely the universe)>all typesYou almost made a valid point but fell short. A heterogeneous mixture of things being scanned means nothing in terms of narrowing down possibilities. However, if we only scanned the top 30% of planets/solar systems most-likely to contain life, and the remaining 70% somehow were concluded to be exponentially less likely to have life, then yes you could extrapolate and make valid subjective (not exactly numerical) statements like "it's very unlikely there is other life in our galaxy". But you never said or implied anything of this sort and this hypothetical would be very difficult to verify.
To qualify what I'm saying, nothing you've said would necessitate a less than 1 in 2 chance of other life existing in the galaxy (we didn't even scan 50%), which is far away from your statement of being "most likely" alone in the galaxy. It could be far far far less, but we don't know from merely scanning the 30%, which again is not even half.
