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That's not the only basis for the grabby aliens theory. Hanson has argued before that we really are alone in the universe, and his grabby aliens theory still says that sentient life is extremely rare. The grabby aliens theory also explains why we are so early in the lifetime of the universe. If we were truly alone, it would be very unlikely that we would have appeared so early.
That's just more Anthropic principle reasoning. If we were truly truly alone, it'd have been very unlikely that we would have appeared at all, and therefore our existence necessitates speculating about multiverses with a vast number of brunches/bubbles (like Koonin does). The difference between scenarios where life is frequent enough for >1 conscious species to exist at the same time, and where we are alone early in history, is very tiny compared to the actual magnitude of uncertainty.
On top of that, we don't know the a priori distribution of opportunities for the emergence of life over time.
I concede this is an improvement on the default Fermi frame.
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