Fermi's Paradox and Rare Earth

I've stated elsewhere my suggestion for the only practical way to
eventually colonize the Milky Way through exponential growth, so I'm
not going to touch FTL or STL methods.

I'm going to just say that I think that clinging to the mediocrity
principle is either insanity or ego, as in the belief you know far
more than you actually do.  We just may be the only intelligent life
to arise in this galaxy.  Asimov accidently stumbled on the truth
trying to avoid Campbell's desire for superior humanity.

From just what we know now, the sun is not at all a mediocre star in
either it's size, luminosity, location, or chemical composition, and
neither is the solar system, with Jupiter being the most im****tant.

Earth itself is not rare.  There's the nearly circular orbit, but the
most im****tant rarity is that big hunk of rock that circles us, and
keeps the planet from tumbling everytime the continents get unevenly
distributed.  Oh, yes, oblique impacts by Mars size planetismals are a
dime a dozen.  It also left a tremendous amount of heat that's still
keeping plate tectonics going and will until past the time that a
heating up sun has made life impossible for everything but the
extremophiles.

The following message did a good job of summarizing the Rare Earth
arguments:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.alien.research/msg/01106eab9327035d