I believe I have stated it before, but I will state it again.....my view;
1. I think the universe is teaming with life, and we may even have life on multiple bodies in our own solar system, even. I believe that given the right elements and time, life is not some random chance, an accident of fate, I think it is inevitable where you have reasonable conditions....water, and a source of nutrients and energy.
2. Probably 90% of this life is single celled, or very small multi celled. Bacterial or plankton type. Pond scum, slime, that sort of thing.
3. 9% of this life is multi cellular.....crabs, mushrooms, plants, rodents....stuff like that.
4. .9% of life is what we would call intelligent. By intelligence, I don't mean dolphins and octopii....I mean able to use tools, create things like dyes and paints, clothing, engage in economics to some level, some kind of societal organization like a government, make fire, make containers to hold things like water and berries. Think Neanderthal intelligent.
5. 0.1% of life is more or less like us.....technological which I define as controlling energy to do work....ine the form of electrical, at minimum, and at a level where they can perceive and study extraplanitary objects....they can look at other planets in their solar system and see what they are made of, whether they have an atmosphere or not, that kind of thing.
6. None of these life forms are present on Earth today, nor are their technologies present here on Earth. It is possible that at some point in the past, they or their technology have been here, perhaps even before humankind evolved. 5 Billion years is a long time. They may have shown up, saw dinosaurs, and flew off after collecting whatever data they were interested in.
7. The reason I subscribe to #6 is because I understand the vastness of the universe, even the distance between stars, I understand the limitations of the speed of light, I understand that any rule breaking of the speed of light is vastly more fiction than it is science, and even if it were possible, the amount of energy required to transcend the speed of light, or create wormholes in space, is beyond comprehension, and anyone who doesn't think so just doesn't have the understanding of physics to grasp the impossibility of it. I do keep an open mind about having been visited at some point in the past, because 5 Billion years is enough time to have someone stop in, and time dilation makes it technologically possible to send probes or even to travel in interstellar space, but by the time they make the round trip, they could find their entire civilization gone.....so it's just not as simple or common as some may wish.
On the topic of "warp speeds and wormholes"....well, let me put a few things into perspective about the kind of energy required for that.....
You're talking about enough energy to bend space into a pretzel, for all practical purposes...a bubble big enough to wrap yourself in it. How much energy would this require?
A "warp bubble" is essentially a gravitational wave that is so extreme it curves in on itself. It is a wave in spacetime that is distorted into a bubble.
Well, LIGO detects black hole mergers...roughly black holes about 20-30 solar masses whipping around one another at nearly the speed of light just a stone's throw away from one another. This massive distortion and massive energy creates gravitational waves that we can now detect with LIGO and other observatories.
How big is that wave that LIGO detects?
That wave is 1/10th the diameter of a single proton. Two massive black holes totalling 50 times the mass of the sun orbiting one another at near light speed, can bend space to the tune of 1/10 of a proton. That's what it takes.
Now, if you want to bend space around a spaceship. Let's say it take the energy of 5000 suns to bend space to that of a single proton. How many protons in diameter is your spaceship?
It is theoretically possible, of course. You would just have to take all the mass of an entire galaxy and convert it all to energy, thus annihilating the entire galaxy, just to get enough energy to create one warp bubble for one ship for one trip.....one way.
Never happened, and it never will.....at least....until we see entire galaxies vanishing from existence one at a time frmo the sky...then we can begin to think about whether warp speed is actually happening.