Why 'Aliens are Plentiful but Unreachable' is an answer everyone hates

 I've been thinking about alien intelligent life again (just got abducted last night again, sigh).

Here is my conclusion again: Aliens are Plentiful but Unreachable. There are various other possible answers to "Is there intelligent life elsewhere?" What's the emotional reaction to each of them?

My answer is about the worst answer I can imagine in terms of human psychology and yearning.Let's go through the others.

If we are alone, then we are truly special, for once. Every other time we thought we were special we actually weren't. This time we are! (If you muse about deities, maybe there really is a personal God, the only one in the Universe, and they care about Earth personally. Just what purpose those billions of other galaxies are serving in God's plan is a mystery, but God's plans always are, right?)

If the reason we won't meet any aliens is that technological civilizations always burn themselves out quickly, that is a doomsday prediction for us here on earth -- and interesting. Maybe we could somehow avoid it! Or we'll fail, but we know they all failed too.

If aliens are close enough to just now pick up our radio signals (as hypothesized in the movie "Contact") then we might just now be coming to their attention, and we can expect a visit! Exciting!

If there are two or three other civilizations in the universe, we can at least dream about them in concrete terms and how they might be different from us. Maybe #1 is like this, and #2 is like that...

The "Zoo Hypothesis" is exciting. Millions of alien civilizations aren't acting independently. One of them is dominant, at least in our vicinity, and powerful enough to keep any other one from making their presence known. This one dominant civilization, for whatever reason, wants to keep us pristine and naive, uncontaminated by knowledge of a much bigger pond in which Earth is just the tiniest fish. That is a motivation we can understand and seems plausible. When and whether they will reveal themselves is a big question. It's a reason to look carefully at the skies because we might at some point learn enough to discover the telltale signs of a zoo. No one said the zookeepers have to have perfect technical prowess.

But then there's my answer. If alien civilizations are to be counted in the millions, then we are nothing special. Just a run-of-the-mill technological civilization. And worse -- we never get to meet the others! It's like the universe saying, "You're not important. There's millions more just like you. But you'll never meet them! I won't tell you a single thing about a single one of them! Nyah-nyah!"