The snowball theory of earth claims that volcanoes and land close to the equator (but not close to the poles) leads to oscillation between a tropical earth and an earth covered in ice.
Our present state of lots of land close to the poles leads to a more stable long term climate.
So if in the future the continents again bunch up around the equator we could see the earth covered in ice once more and another mass extinction.
Is this yet another reason why we have not made contact with aliens?
Yet another reason in addition to, just off the top of my head:
A stable star
Being a good distance from that star.
Asteroid sweeper like Jupiter and Saturn.
A magnetosphere.
A large close moon which will keep the core hot so you can have a magnetosphere.
No X-ray exploding super novas near by.
Life
Intelligent life
Intelligent life that doesn't destroy itself.
Space faring life
And all of this has to happen at the same time, at least until space flight takes them far from the home planet.
Space isn't really big at all when you think in geological rather than individual scales. It probably only takes a couple of thousand years post-Apollo to colonize dozens of stars.
The real reason we don't see aliens is probably contemporaneity.
Although in that context I have another remark. The Drake formula, often brought up in these discussions has a major omission: it doesn't account for multiple intelligent species over the total lifespan of a planet. I don't see why, a couple of million years after humanity's extinction, another intelligent species could arise and go through the whole space-flight thing again.
A planet like Earth could have a typical cycle:
0.0 GA: formation
3.0 GA: bacteria
5.0 GA: intelligent species 1
5.1 GA: intelligent species 2
5.2 GA: intelligent species 2
5.3 GA: intelligent species 3
...
8.0 GA: oceans boil away, parent star going manic
9.0 GA: destruction due to parent star going kabloom
The snowball theory of earth claims that volcanoes and land close to the equator (but not close to the poles) leads to oscillation between a tropical earth and an earth covered in ice.
Our present state of lots of land close to the poles leads to a more stable long term climate.
So if in the future the continents again bunch up around the equator we could see the earth covered in ice once more and another mass extinction.
Is this yet another reason why we have not made contact with aliens?
Yet another reason in addition to, just off the top of my head:
A stable star
Being a good distance from that star.
Asteroid sweeper like Jupiter and Saturn.
A magnetosphere.
A large close moon which will keep the core hot so you can have a magnetosphere.
No X-ray exploding super novas near by.
Life
Intelligent life
Intelligent life that doesn't destroy itself.
Space faring life
And all of this has to happen at the same time, at least until space flight takes them far from the home planet.
Also space is BIG.