On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 11:03:12 -0700 (PDT), Gary Harnagel
wrote:
We are here but that says nothing about how many more Earth like
planets
there are in the rest of the universe.

The number is not important. All that's needed is ONE in hundreds
of
trillions FEW BILLION YEARS AGO.

Which makes the number important: you want it to be greater than
zero. But if you drop the requirement of a few billion years ago, we
already have one - that's us.

Yep, if you think one single advanced civilization is enough, why not
choose the single one we already know?