So what shall we do? Nothing? Not bother to search with whatever
means we have at our disposal? Hope they show up sometime soon?
Close our eyes and ears and devices to the rest of the Universe?

Might as well close our minds, too. Many never seem to really open
them anyway.

The huge numbers of celestial bodies in this Universe DO count for
something in the SETI equation: It means we have explored so little
of it in any detail for only a mere fraction of the time that the Universe
has existed, yet because alien life hasn't decided to make itself really
visible or give us a call, we assume it isn't out there.

I'm starting to think there is something more than just the lack of
evidence behind this recent trend to think we are the only complex
life in existence.

But what bothers me more is the fact that there are those who say
we haven't found any yet, so that means there probably isn't any, so
let's not bother to look.

That is not science. That is not exploration. That is not human
curiousity and boldness in action. That is stagnation and possibly
something worse.

Astronomers once theorized that pulsars and planets existed around
other stars, but until we started looking for them, many dismissed their
existence. The same goes for alien life. It IS absurd to think that in
a Universe of 50 billion galaxies with 70 septillion stars that we are the
only intelligent beings in it. As they said in Contact, that is a waste
of space.