This is the realm of the Fermi Paradox (which is a misnomer because it's not really a paradox at all).
The key question is that if planets are so common and space is so big, why does it seem to be so empty of life? You bring up an argument that maybe life is so different as to be undetectable. It's a fair question to ask but the beauty of the Fermi Paradox is that you don't need to argue about what's most likely. You simply have to be concerned with what's possible.
Let me put it this way. let's say that there is 1 other spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way and they've evolved like you said in a way completely alien to us and as such don't follow a path we can easily detect or at least we don't think to look for it. I can buy that as entirely possible.
But now let's assume there are 1,000 spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that every one them falls in this category? What are the odds that none of them follow a similar evolutionary path to us and what we consider highly likely? It becomes increasingly incredulous as you scale up the number of civilizations.
So what's more likely? 1,000 civilizations followed a path alien to us independently? Or that there are few to no other civilizations out there to detect?
To say we're the only 1 of 1,000 to follow this path is really a different kind of human-centric hubris.
Extracting energy from a star is so low-tech it defies logic to think we're the only ones who will (likely) do it.
The key question is that if planets are so common and space is so big, why does it seem to be so empty of life? You bring up an argument that maybe life is so different as to be undetectable. It's a fair question to ask but the beauty of the Fermi Paradox is that you don't need to argue about what's most likely. You simply have to be concerned with what's possible.
Let me put it this way. let's say that there is 1 other spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way and they've evolved like you said in a way completely alien to us and as such don't follow a path we can easily detect or at least we don't think to look for it. I can buy that as entirely possible.
But now let's assume there are 1,000 spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that every one them falls in this category? What are the odds that none of them follow a similar evolutionary path to us and what we consider highly likely? It becomes increasingly incredulous as you scale up the number of civilizations.
So what's more likely? 1,000 civilizations followed a path alien to us independently? Or that there are few to no other civilizations out there to detect?
To say we're the only 1 of 1,000 to follow this path is really a different kind of human-centric hubris.
Extracting energy from a star is so low-tech it defies logic to think we're the only ones who will (likely) do it.