Imagine you're an alien explorer. You visit Earth 25,000 krugs ago (51,304 Earth-years ago) and see a pretty standard ecological milieu: a wide variety of species, each adapted to its own little environment, no different than it was 50 million krugs before.

You return today and see that one previously unremarkable ape-like species has spread out to all parts of the world and is even orbiting in little tin cans around the planet. Almost all wild terrestrial megafauna is gone and the megafauna that remains is raised by the "humans" in massive farms. They've converted forests and jungles into farms and cities, and they're spending vast amounts of energy to make silicon think.

The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy.

Why would they be surprised? They'll have evolved from some previously unremarkable animal, and presumably have also caused habitat damage.

It's possible we're an extraordinary species somehow, but it's rather more likely we're unremarkable, and the aliens will just think we have particularly bad taste in television.

This assumes a pretty basic human sci-fi version of aliens. Any species capable of physically getting here would also likely still see us as a non-threat to anything other than ourselves.

Why nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?

Does that strike you as an unusual path for an intelligent species to become space faring? We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.

I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.

Add to that, the previous species you identified as a particularly clever pack animal formed a relationship with the monkeys and now looks like this:

https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...

At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.

Do you know what all those megafauna, jungles, and forests had in common? They rely on or emit. Oxygen originated with cyanobacteria. [1] When cyanobacteria emerged they basically just genocided the entire planet because their emitted oxygen was extremely toxic to most of everything else alive at the time. It'd be like if plants today started emitting gaseous arsenic and flooded the oceans and atmosphere with it. So you end up having your enlightened aliens longing for a planet that exists only because of 'pollution' on a scale that caused a mass extinction event. We should work, within reason to preserve what we have, but the self loathing is nonsensical.

Humanity isn't perfect but it's pretty awesome, and may ultimately be the only reason that the species that exist on this planet are able to continue to exist. We're overdue for another major external mass extinction event, but this time humanity will hopefully be able to mitigate its effects. And as we expand our reach into the cosmos we'll certainly be bringing along our furry friends, tasty friends, helpful bacteria, and many others along for the ride. And they'll continue to thrive far beyond what might otherwise be their fate, left to their own devices on Earth.

If anything I'd think our enlightened aliens would be worried about us managing to kill ourselves before we reach into the stars. We're probably quite close, on both accounts. Hopefully we win the right race.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria

For a funny take on this, read With Friends Like These by Alan Dean Foster. Aliens are scared to death of humans, and with good reason. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35128.With_Friends_Li...

Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.

By definition, evolution selects for species that are good at making more of themselves. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that intelligent species tend to overcome that evolutionary tendency to spread fast enough for us to be weird.

Do we really want to make contact with meat?

Reminds me of the Simpson’s episode where Lisa grows a society.

Or the aliens did the same thing we did?

More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best... and that's if anyone's looking for the faintest of faint traces.

The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.

So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.

"The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy."

Or they are cybernetic lifeforms and are applauding our current trajectory.