On aliens - surely it would be weirder if our planet were the only one in the vastness of space with life forms, pretty unlikely isn't it?
It depends what you mean by "life forms". We know that primitive life is pretty easy to get going. What seems much more difficult, to the extent that it seems to have happened only once in the Earth's history, is one bacteria being engulfed by another but carrying on working, giving the cell structure essential for complex life. So there may be simple life on billions and billions of planets, maybe even in other places in our solar system (Jupiter's moons are looking like possibilities) but complex life seems likely to be very, very rare. It may have been a one-off.
Now add the likelihood that complex life has evolved at the same time as us, in the almost-14 billion years since the birth of the universe, and the vast distances and times involved in travelling between stars. The chance that our very uninteresting little star out on one of the spiral arms of one of the galaxies has been visited by intelligent aliens is so remote as to be negligible. I wish it weren't so, but it is.