In 1961, Frank Drake developed an equation with a string of variables to try to determine the frequency of intelligent life. Over the years, some of the variables have been plugged in. Maybe planets are just very rare? They’re not. Perhaps few planets orbit their star in the “Goldilocks zone” where it isn’t too hot or cold? No, it seems that lots do. This may sound like another round of Copernican humiliation: In a galaxy with up to 400 billion stars, many with orbiting planets, surely there’s some other intelligent, technological species. But humans have been scanning the spectra for decades and have found nothing.

Earlier this year, a group at the University of Oxford released a paper arguing that our knowledge of the universe and of math should lead us to assume that intelligent life is most probably an extremely rare event, depending on a series of fortuitous circumstances—like the weirdly large size of our moon, perhaps— that are so unlikely as to almost never happen. Humanity shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t found aliens, because most likely there aren’t any.

But, seriously, where are the aliens?

It’s important to note that these arguments depend on probabilities, and that our search for intelligent life in the cosmos is still woefully incomplete. But even so, it looks increasingly possible that humans may indeed be alone, or that we might have some mind-bogglingly gigantic region of the cosmos to ourselves. As this idea slowly seeps into our consciousness, it’s going to have deep cultural consequences. The mental habits of two centuries will lead us to strenuously resist this new picture of the galaxy, especially since, from ancient myths to postmodern sci-fi, humanity has almost always understood itself in relation to a nonhuman or superhuman Other.

If the revelation that humans are probably alone in our universe stands, and as that revelation sinks into our collective psyche, it could effect a second, weirder Copernican revolution in culture. To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant. To the contrary, the everyday breath of the least of us contains meaning in so concentrated a form that a cup’s worth of it could be doled out to a dozen star systems, transforming the arid matter into a garden of significance.