I'd say that the chances of us ever coming into contact with intelligent life are worryingly low until well (as in, billions of years) into the future. If we sa

I'd say that the chances of us ever coming into contact with intelligent life are worryingly low until well (as in, billions of years) into the future. If we say that "ultimate maturity" of a civilization is to have a technological singularity of some sort, resources wouldn't really be an issue. SETI hasn't picked up anything. Assuming that the universe is infinite in extent, as it currently is hypothesized to be, the only real solution is that life is so spread out as to be almost irrelevantly far away.