An Analysis of the Bunk in a Caltech Cosmology Press Release

 Let us look at all of the many examples of bunk, baloney and BS in a recent press release on the topic of a new telescope called SPHEREx.  The press release can be read here.  The topic was a new satellite that will be launched in an attempt to do studies related to the groundless theory of primordial cosmic inflation. Not to be confused with the seemingly well-established Big Bang theory that the universe suddenly began around 13 billion years ago, the theory of primordial cosmic inflation is the theory that for just a fraction of its first second, the universe underwent a super-fast type of expansion called exponential expansion. 

CALTECH PRESS RELEASE	REALITY
Title: “What Hundreds of Millions of Galaxies Can Teach Us About the Big Bang.”	Galaxies are believed to have formed billions or at least very many millions of years after the Big Bang. You can't actually learn anything about the Big Bang from studying galaxies, just as you can't learn about ancient times by studying the Renaissance period.
Subtitle: “NASA's SPHEREx mission will provide new clues about the explosive, inflationary phase of our universe.”	No it will not, and there is no good reason to believe such an    inflationary phase ever happened. The universe seems to have underwent a dramatic expansion early in its history, but there is no reason to believe that the universe ever expanded at an explosive, exponential rate, as imagined by the adherents of the cosmic inflation theory.
“Among several big questions the [SPHEREx] mission is poised to answer is how our universe came to be.”	This claim is the most outrageous fiction. The mission cannot possibly tell us any such thing. Physical factors such as the very extreme density of mass-energy in the first 200,000 years will forever prevent any observation that could explain what caused the Big Bang, and will forever prevent any possibility of observing what happened during the first 200,000 years after the Big Bang.
“SPHEREx will provide new clues in the quest to understand cosmic inflation, a much-studied theory that states our newborn universe expanded a trillion-trillion-fold in a fraction of a second—much less time than it takes to snap your fingers.”	While there seems to be good evidence that the universe expanded from a tiny point billions of years ago (in other words, that the Big Bang occurred), there is no good evidence that the  cosmic inflation theory is true, and all attempts to get evidence for it have failed. There is zero evidence that "the universe expanded a trillion-trillion-fold in a fraction of a second" or that anything like such exponential expansion occurred. Instead of it being one theory, the cosmic inflation theory is a family of many hundreds of theories, making predictions “all over the map.” “Provide new clues” is a vague phrase used to try to justify research failing to either confirm or disprove a theory, often used for research of little importance or relevance.
“As mind-bending as inflation is, the theory, which was proposed by physicist Alan Guth and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s, continues to stand the test of time, making several accurate predictions about features in our universe. "	A bad misrepresentation of the status of cosmic inflation theory. No distinctive and exact predictions of the cosmic inflation were ever verified. Since there are so many hundreds of versions of the theory, which each can predict many different things by varying the input parameters, inevitably some match to reality will be found. But no version of the cosmic inflation theory has had any impressive predictive success.
"Now, the pressing question on most cosmologists' minds is not whether inflation occurred but how.”	The insinuation that most cosmologists believe in the theory is not backed up by any evidence. There is no secret ballot poll of cosmologists showing such a thing. At the end of a 2016 paper, the one here, there is a poll of cosmologists. In Question 11 of the poll, on page 77, cosmologists were asked to complete a sentence beginning with "Our understanding of inflation  will..."  The results were these: Only 44% predicted success for the main effort of cosmologists to get evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, predicting that there would be  "primordial B-mode detection" occurring. 7%  predicted that inflation would be "ruled out." 5% predicted there would be a detection of "non-zero spatial curvature," something that would rule out the theory of primordial cosmic inflation.  It seems at the time of such a poll, there was no majority favoring of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, with a significant fraction of cosmologists rejecting it.  In the eight years since the poll, there have been big expensive projects trying to get "primordial B-mode detection," but all have failed. If the poll were to be taken today, it would probably show an even larger fraction of cosmologists rejecting the theory of primordial cosmic inflation.
"Inflation successfully describes our universe, but we are struggling to understand how it came about."	The theory of cosmic inflation does not successfully describe our universe in any detail. The admission about "struggling to understand how it came about" is an admission that there is no solid theoretical understanding of any physical cause that would caused the imagined cosmic inflation to have occurred.
"SPHEREx's three primary goals are to explore the origins of water and organic molecules in planetary systems, the history of galaxy formation, and the mechanisms behind cosmic inflation—the "bang" in the big bang that set our universe in motion."	There are no conceivable observations of the SPHEREx telescope that could ever explain "the mechanisms behind cosmic inflation—the 'bang' in the big bang that set our universe in motion."
" 'I can't think of a more profound question: studying the first fractions of a seconds of existence,' says Phillip Korngut, the mission's instrument scientist at Caltech. 'The clumpiness in galaxy positions is tied to quantum fluctuations in the early universe when it was unfathomably tiny and hot. We are making precise measurements of galaxy density variations and then will tie that back mathematically to what happened in the early universe.' "	No observations of the SPHEREx telescope will be anything like studying the first fractions of a second of existence. There are so many hundreds of different versions of the cosmic inflation theory (with predictions all over the map) that nothing we observe about galaxies will tell us whether such a theory is true.
"Scientists introduced the theory of cosmic inflation to explain certain features of our universe that were hard to make sense of with the big bang theory alone."	This is not at all true. The features mentioned do make sense "with the big bang theory alone," under the assumption that the Big Bang was purposefully caused to lead to a habitable universe.  The theory of cosmic inflation was advanced solely to avoid such an assumption, which conflicted with atheistic preferences of cosmologists.
"The goal of the BICEP–Keck collaboration is to search for telltale signs of inflation: curly patterns in polarized light called B-modes. These swirly patterns may have been produced as gravitational waves—which are ripples not in matter but in space-time itself—washed through the swelling cosmos. The current phase of the collaboration, called BICEP Array, includes the most sensitive receivers yet, each about 10 times more powerful than the earlier generation. Although the collaboration has not detected B-modes, it has set the field's strongest upper limits on their brightness."	We have here a description of a gigantic failure of the cosmic inflation theory. Vast sums of money have been spent looking for the B-modes the theory predicted, but no such B-modes have been found. The failure is a strong reason for rejecting all of the claims the Caltech press release has made about the cosmic inflation theory, and for disbelieving in such a theory.
"Using SPHEREx's galaxy maps, scientists will be able to look for a tantalizing feature of many theories of inflation that has been nearly impossible to address until now—namely, whether or not the distribution of tiny ripples of matter formed at the time of inflation follows a so-called Gaussian distribution."	Many versions of the cosmic inflation theory predict such a Gaussian distribution, and many other versions of the theory do not predict such a Gaussian distribution. So the described observations will not help determine whether the cosmic inflation theory is true.
"Physicists think that inflation was caused by a repulsive blast that came from a high-energy field referred to as the inflaton—in other words, from a single field."	The so-called inflaton field is entirely chimerical, having no basis in any established physics. Cosmologists speculating about an inflaton field are in the same class as theologians speculating about the wind pressure caused by the flapping of angel wings.
"By measuring the degree to which galaxies clump together across the sky, researchers can test complex non-Gaussian models of inflation against the simpler Gaussian ones."	This statement  confirms what I said above, that measuring such galaxy clumping will not actually do anything to confirm the cosmic inflation theory, because there are both "Gaussian" and "non-Gaussian" versions of the theory.
"Chen Heinrich, a Caltech research scientist on the SPHEREx team, notes that the kinds of quantum-scale particle and field interactions they are studying cannot be reproduced in a lab on Earth. 'The universe has done the experiment for us,' she says. 'We can learn about the earliest moments of our universe by analyzing the cosmic web of galaxies. It's crazy cool.' "	Not crazy cool, just silly enough to be called crazy. You cannot learn about the earliest moments of the universe by analyzing galaxies.

When you add up all the money that has been spent trying to confirm the theory of primordial cosmic inflation and all the money that has been spent trying to confirm the theory of dark matter, you have a sum of something like 3,000,000,000 dollars. No good evidence for been found for either thing, so the dollars have been wasted. These efforts are schematically depicted in the visual below:

The paper "Primordial Gravitational Waves 2024" tells us the implications of the failure to find primordial b-modes.  The paper says, "When comparing the theoretical predictions of selected inflationary scenarios with the most stringent constraint from BPD, we find that natural inflation and models with concave potential are obviously ruled out, and power-law inflation and R2 inflation are basically excluded at 2 σ CL."  That basically means that all of the main theories of cosmic inflation have been ruled out by observations.  The Caltech press release utterly fails to discuss this situation honestly, and gives us a phony "all is well" narrative. Of course die-hard cosmic inflation theorists are almost boundlessly ingenious at inventing convoluted new "epicycles" of speculation to try and save their cherished theory, at the cost of making their arcane speculations more and more elaborate and more and more unbelievable. 

It is a sign of utter dysfunction in science when a theory that fails to predict correctly is not written off as a failure, and you have a situation when endless new speculations are introduced to try to keep the sinking theory afloat.  For 45 years cosmic inflation theory has been a cesspool of unwarranted hype and wasted effort. In a recent Reuters article a scientist is quoted as saying, "We have pretty good evidence that inflation occurred." There is zero evidence that the primordial cosmic inflation referred to ever occurred. The band of cosmologists that believe in cosmic inflation theory is a diehard ivory tower belief community consisting of only about a thousand persons, a cult-like group dedicated to propagating its cherished belief dogma, no matter what is observed. Given the long record of misstatements on this topic, we should not trust any generalizations or evidence claims that the members of this belief community make about this topic. 

The cosmic inflation theory (really a large family of theories) was originally invented to try to show that the universe's beginning was not so enormously fine-tuned. But no version of the theory ever succeeded in reducing the gigantic improbability of the universe naturally beginning in a way ending up with a habitable universe. All that happened was that a huge case of fine-tuning in one place (the universe's initial expansion rate) was theoretically removed, at the price of introducing equally great fine-tuning in lots of other places. So this was pointless "robbing Peter to pay Paul" activity. 

The cosmic inflation theory is like someone trying to reduce the improbability of Lee Harvey Oswald getting two shots hitting US President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, by postulating that Oswald got only one successful shot, and that a second shot hitting Kennedy came from a second gunman on the grassy knoll who coincidentally was shooting elsewhere in Dealey Plaza at exactly the same time, not because of any plot involving both. Such a theory is useless, because while it reduces the luck required in one spot (the Texas School Book Depository building where Oswald shot from), it does not reduce the overall improbability of two shots hitting Kennedy, given the extreme unlikelihood of two unconnected shooters shooting in the same place and the same time. Similarly, cosmic inflation theory may theoretically reduce some improbability at one instant, but does not reduce the overall improbability of a universe starting out in a way that leads to a habitable universe, because so many special "just right" conditions must be met for a universe to undergo an exponential expansion (as imagined by cosmic inflation theory), and then end up in the state we now observe. The 45-year get-nowhere misadventure of cosmic inflation theory is hamster-wheel science at its worst. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Two improbable criteria have to be satisfied for inflation to start. First, shortly after the big bang, there has to be a patch of space where the quantum fluctuations of spacetime have died down and the space is well described by Einstein’s classical equations of general relativity; second, the patch of space must be flat enough and have a smooth enough distribution of energy that the inflationary energy can grow to dominate all other forms of energy. Several theoretical estimates of the probability of finding a patch with these characteristics just after the big bang suggest that it is more difficult than finding a snowy mountain equipped with a ski lift and well-maintained ski slopes in the middle of a desert. More important, if it were easy to find a patch emerging from the big bang that is flat and smooth enough to start inflation, then inflation would not be needed in the first place. Recall that the entire motivation for introducing it was to explain how the visible universe came to have these properties; if starting inflation requires those same properties, with the only difference being that a smaller patch of space is needed, that is hardly progress. Such issues are just the beginning of our problems, however. Not only does inflation require starting conditions that are difficult to obtain, it also impossible to stop inflation once it gets going....If inflation took place the CMB should contain evidence of cosmic gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime caused by the early stretching—yet it does not." -- Three cosmologists (link). 
• "The problem is that no particular model of inflation has been shown to work yet." -- Physicist Philip Gibbs (link).
• "The staggering amount of fine-tuning which is required disturbs many cosmologists."  -- Two physicists, referring to the cosmic inflation theory (link). 

His Critique of Scientist Overconfidence Is Sharp, But He Should Broaden His Focus

At the "Not Even Wrong" blog, mathematician Peter Woit recently asks, "Whose job is it to explain to the public that they were misled by overenthusiastic scientists?" For many years Woit has taken on the job of explaining to the public how the public is being misled by a belief community of overenthusiastic physicists called string theorists.  Woit has long posted at this "Not Even Wrong" blog site, which you can reach here. By now he has been posting at the blog site for twenty years. 

The site started out to help publicize his book "Not Even Wrong," which is a critique of a type of groundless physics speculation called string theory. Woit has published some very lucid posts that have criticized the overconfidence of speculative physicists and multiverse theorists.  But while he has shown himself to be someone who is skillful at "pulling back the wizard's curtain" by exposing the bluster and bluffing of physicists passing themselves off as "grand lords of knowledge," Woit has confined such a skill to too narrow a field of study. Similar bluffing and bluster is going on in many other areas of science that Woit rarely writes about. 

Woit has written 163 posts with a tag of "Multiverse Mania." In these posts he criticizes pretty well the extravagance and dogmatism of people who appeal to the idea of a vast collection of universes, without having any observational basis for such speculations. But as far as I can see. Woit has never shown much insight as to what caused multiverse speculations to arise. In his 2018 post "15 Years of Multiverse Mania" he says this: 

"KKLT did not mention anthropics and the multiverse, but less than a month later Lenny Susskind published The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory, a call to arms for anthropics and a founding document of Multiverse Mania. He immediately went to work on writing a book-length version of string theory multiverse propaganda aimed at the public, The Cosmic Landscape, which was published in 2005."

The full title of that book makes very clear what Susskind's motivation was in promoting the idea of the multiverse. The title was "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design."  Susskind was very bothered by the reality of cosmic fine-tuning, the fact that in many ways our universe has laws and fundamental constants that seem very fine-tuned to allow our universe to be compatible with the existence of intelligent life, against all odds.  The multiverse is a gigantically extravagant and utterly fallacious attempt to evade the implications of such a reality, the implication that our universe is the work of a purposeful agency. The multiverse theorist appeals to some infinity or near-infinity of universes, claiming that if there is such an infinity or near-infinity, having one life-compatible universe would not be so improbable.   

This theoretical maneuver is futile, because by imagining a multiverse you do not change the odds of any one universe being compatible with the existence of life.  Similarly, if I imagine an infinite universe filled with an infinite number of gamblers playing poker, that does nothing to change the odds of me being dealt three royal flushes while playing poker in a particular poker session. For a full discussion of all of the reasons why multiverse reasoning utterly fails to explain cosmic fine-tuning, read my posts here and here.  

The factors that inspired multiverse speculations are depicted in the visual below:

The arising of multiverse claims was an act of desperation by people such as Susskind who were clearly bothered by how fined-tuned our universe is:

The desperation of an appeal to the multiverse was part of the evolution (or should we say the devolution) of materialism:

Although writing 160+ posts with a tag of "Multiverse Mania," Woit seems to have failed to perceive the analgesic motivations of the multiverse idea. The idea was a desperate attempt at pain-relief by physicists and others who were very bothered by the mounting evidence that our universe was very  precisely fine-tuned to allow intelligent life to exist in it. 

 

String theory was an offshoot of a simpler theory called supersymmetry theory, and that theory arose mainly as an attempt to sweep under the rug one of the many examples of cosmic-fine tuning, an example involving the Higgs boson/Higgs field. Scientists are puzzled by why the Higgs field has the strength it has, and they say that it seems to require fine-tuning to 15 decimal places or more. This is a problem called the hierarchy problem or the naturalness problem. 

As a Daily Galaxy article once put it, “Using theory as it currently stands, the mass of the Higgs boson can only be explained as the result of a random fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe at a level of accuracy of one in one quadrillion.” Aaccording to this scientific web site, “one has to hypothesize that the several correction terms cancel out to a part in 10^34 (a hundred billionths of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth), if one is to make the Higgs mass smaller than a lead brick.” 

The causal relation between string theory and supersymmetry theory is shown by the following query of the Google Ngram viewer, showing references in books to the two theories:

We see above the rise and fall of supersymmetry, a theory (like string theory) never supported by observations. 

Woit often does a good job of exposing the bluffing and bluster of overconfident scientists pretending to understand grand matters that they don't understand. But despite twenty years of posting to his "Not Even Wrong" blog, he has never seemed to broaden his scope to a more general treatment of the different types of belief communities of overenthusiastic scientists who are misleading the public, largely to serve their own vested interests.  The overconfidence of string theorists is not some freak occurrence in which some tiny group of scientists act differently from the way 99% of scientists act. The overconfidence of string theorists is just one example of a pattern of dysfunction that is extremely common in the world of scientific academia.  There are quite a few other scientist communities guilty of the same kind of very severe overconfidence, dogmatism, bad research methods and frequently erring and dishonest speech that we so often see in the community of string theorists. And some of those overconfident scientist communities are very much bigger and much more influential than the tiny community of string theorists. 

Woit should read my 63 posts with a tag of "overblown hype" to get ideas on how he might broaden his very narrow critique which has covered only a small fraction of the overenthusiastic scientists misleading the public. String theorists and supersymmetry theorists are only a small fraction of the scientists who abundantly use a technique I call math-spraying. The technique involves the abundant use of speculative mathematics to try to give a scientific aura to speculations that are not well-rooted in observations, or perhaps entirely unrooted in them. 

"Humility Is Virtuous" Is a Bad Argument for Super-Advanced Extraterrestrials

When I was a young man, when I knew very much less than I know now, I believed that our galaxy was filled with extraterrestrial civilizations that had arisen naturally. I can now look back at the two main arguments I used in my mind to support this belief, and I can understand why such arguments were fallacious. 

One of the two arguments I used was an argument that can be described as "many chances equals some successes." The argument can be stated like this:

• "There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be some  planets on which life exists."
• "There are billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be some planets with extraterrestrial civilizations."
• "There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so life must have arisen on some other planets."
• "There are a vast number of planets in our universe, so there must be some other civilizations on other planets."
• "There are a huge number of planets in our universe, so there must be some other extraterrestrial civilizations."

This argument is often used by those arguing for an abundance of extraterrestrial life.  For example,  astronomer Seth Shostak states this:

"But there are roughly a trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Buy a trillion lottery tickets, you're going to win."

But such reasoning is completely fallacious. It is not at all true in general that "many chances equals many successes." It is also not at all true in general that "many chances equals some successes" or even that "many chances equals at least one success." If the probability of something happening is sufficiently low, then we should expect many chances to yield zero successes.  So "many chances" does not necessarily equal "many successes," and "many chances" does not necessarily equal "some successes" or even one success. For example:

• If everyone in the world threw a deck of cards into the air 1000 times, that would be almost 10 trillion chances for such flying cards to form into a house of cards, but we should not expect that in even one case would the flying deck of cards accidentally form into a house of cards. 
• If a billion computers around the world each made a thousand attempts to write an intelligible book by randomly generating 100,000 characters, that would be a total of a trillion chances for an  intelligible book to be accidentally generated, but we should not expect that even one of these attempts would result in the creation of an intelligible book. 
• If you buy a million tickets in a winner-take-all lottery in which the chance of winning is only 1 in 100 million, you should not expect that any one of those tickets will succeed in winning such a lottery. 

Below are some very general observations about probability:

• It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield many successes. 
• It is not necessarily true that many chances (also called trials) will yield some successes or even one success. 
• If the chance of success on any one trial multiplied by the number of trials gives a number less than 1, we should not expect that even one of the trials will produce a success.

How should we calculate the chance of extraterrestrial life accidentally arising on at least one planet revolving around any star in the universe? We should judge whether the chance of success on any one trial (the chance of life appearing accidentally on a random planet) multiplied by the estimated number of planets in the observable universe is a number greater than 1.  The number of stars in the observable universe has been estimated as a billion trillion. Given about 10 planets per star, we can estimate the number of planets in the observable universe as ten billion trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). 

Roughly speaking, if the chance of life randomly appearing on the average planet is greater than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, we should expect that life exists on at least one other planet. But if the chance of life randomly appearing on the average planet is less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, we should expect (given only chance) that no life exists outside of our solar system. 

Unfortunately for extraterrestrial life enthusiasts, there is every reason for suspecting that the chance of life appearing on any random planet (because of accidental chemical combinations) is very, very much less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Even the simplest microbe requires 300 or more types of functional protein molecules.  An average functional protein molecule consists of hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional result.  It has been estimated that the probability of a functional protein molecule forming by chance is less than 1 in 10 to the hundredth power. 

A team of 9 scientists wrote a scientific paper entitled, “Essential genes of a minimal bacterium.” It analyzed a type of bacteria (Mycoplasma genitalium) that has “the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure culture.” According to wikipedia's article, this bacteria has 525 genes consisting of 580,070 base pairs. The paper concluded that 382 of this bacteria's protein-coding genes (72 percent) are essential.  Similarly, a recent report from scientists long attempting to estimate the simplest possible microbe is a report estimating that such a microbe would have 473 genes with 531,000 base pairs. 

Here the math tells a decisive tale.  It seems that by chance that nowhere in the observable universe would there form even one of the functional protein molecules needed for life. But more than 300 types of such molecules would be needed for even the simplest thing to exist. Even the simplest microbe is a purposeful arrangement of about 90,000 amino acids parts, just as a 50-page instruction manual is a purposeful arrangement of about 50,000 letters. 

So "many chances equals some successes" fails as an argument for extraterrestrial life. But many scientists keep witlessly using the argument, just as many scientists keep witlessly using other fallacious arguments. 

There was another fallacious argument I would often use in my mind when I was a young man believing in the naturally occurring abundance of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. The argument was a kind of "humility is virtuous" argument.  The reasoning would go rather like this:

"We should not be be vain and egotistical; we should be humble. To maintain that man is the most advanced organism in our galaxy is to commit the sin of egotism and pride.  It's much better to have humility, and realize that we are very far from being the most advanced creatures in our galaxy."

I found this argument being used by an authority who made the argument the main focus of an article he wrote. The authority is a frequent liar who has repeatedly deceived the public by making untrue claims about weak evidence that he claims as evidence for extraterrestrials. Having failed in such clumsy and deceit-plagued attempts, the authority gave us the old "humility is virtuous" argument for extraterrestrials that I fallaciously used as a young man, as if this person had grown weary of his old BS. 

I can explain why the "humility is virtuous" argument fails as a logically compelling argument for extraterrestrials. The reason is that the argument is an example of circular reasoning. The "humility is virtuous" argument commits the logical fallacy known as begging the question. Begging the question is when you make an argument that starts out by assuming what it is trying to prove. 

The "humility is virtuous" argument starts out by assuming that mankind is an inferior species in our galaxy or our universe, and then proceeds to argue that it is egotism and conceit for someone to think that his species is the most advanced or the highest form of life, when it is not.  But that's begging the question, because you start out by assuming the existence of superior extraterrestrials. If there are no superior extraterrestrials in our galaxy or our universe, then no sin of pride is committed if someone thinks that mankind is the most advanced species in the galaxy or the universe. Similarly, if you are the richest man in your city, you commit no sin of pride by regarding yourself as the richest man in your city; and if you are the richest man in your country, you commit no sin of pride by regarding yourself as the richest man in your country. 

The authority writing the article I refer to tried a toxic variation on the "humility is virtuous" argument for extraterrestrials. He claimed that mankind must be really inferior because men have no free will.  He gave us the malignant nonsense of free will denialism, the senseless denying of the most obvious truth that humans have free will.  We should not be surprised that this authority told the lie that we have no free will, because he has often lied about a variety of things. 

The "humility is virtuous" argument for believing in extraterrestrials is not convincing, because it commits the fallacy of begging the question, assuming the existence of what it is trying to prove. The "many chances equals some successes" argument for extraterrestrials is a failure, because it simply isn't true that many chances equals some successes, in any case when we have reason to believe that the chance of success on each trial multiplied by the number of trials is a number less than 1. 

It is still very possible that there are many extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy or in our universe. Although the probability of life naturally appearing on a planet (by blind, accidental processes) seems to be close to zero, it is quite possible that life arises on many planets with the assistance of some superhuman agency interested in having life appear on more than one planet. There are powerful reasons for believing in the existence of such an agency. Also, it could be that observations of UFOs and reports of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide evidence for thinking that our planet has had extraterrestrial visitors.  Given some motivation, I could probably write a rather compelling essay arguing for the likelihood of extraterrestrials in our galaxy. But the essay would use reasoning very different from the fallacious armchair arguments I used for such an idea when I was a young man. 

Are there others in our galaxy?

"Humility is virtuous" arguments can easily be turned upside down, rather like in the conversation below:

John: Humility is virtuous! We should not be conceited! So we should believe we are like ants compared to godlike superminds that arose on other planets. 

Jim:  So if humility is so important, then we should regard ourselves as creatures with minds and powers very tiny compared to some all powerful infinite Mind we should thank for our existence. 

John:  No, no, I meant being humble in my way, not yours !