Originally Posted by Relentless

Space is incomprehensibly large. It is many billions of times larger than what humans think of when they try to comprehend 'infinite' as a concept. The fact that life probably exists somewhere in the universe doesn't mean it exists close to us or is detectable by our current ability to sense.

As to higher life forms exterminating themselves, things do tend toward equilibrium it seems. However, the problem is probably more of how we feel about it than anything else. We tend to view death, destruction and extinction as 'bad' things because from our perspective they are, but from the perspective of the cosmos an extinction of one species or an entire galaxy is just another insignificant blip on a never ending timeline of things that change. Our species is so unjustly arrogant, to such a degree, that we actually think our existence matters in some way and that we are somehow different in the grand scheme of things than every other particle that exists now, existed previously, or will exist in the future. Our arrogance prevents us from being boring to ourselves, but that's about it.