Technology

as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.

I don't worry about it, because it is a very small number and my life is likely very short by comparison, but... the very large number of potential sites for life to evolve in the visible universe still yields zero evidence of a technological "WE ARE HERE" sign that we can understand. That implies that either: A) we really are the center of the universe, first to develop technology or B) such developments of energy manipulating technology are an exceedingly small number rare for... reasons that we do not yet understand. And of course C) those of us who have seen irrefutable proof of alien technology are hiding it from the rest of us for... reasons.

Of the possibilities, I find A) much less likely than B), and C) to be impossibly absurd - people just aren't that good at keeping secrets for long periods of time.

Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this.

You're analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can't do is analyze a risk we haven't imagined yet. Looking at the vastness of the Universe and the rate at which our theories about how it all works evolve, I find it far more likely that we haven't imagined more of actual reality than we have.

sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.

Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen. What we don't know is all of the causes or all of the existing conditions that will precede such events.

When such event does "miraculously" happen we may be able to learn from observation what likely triggered it and then it won't be "miraculous" anymore, it will have an analyzable probability - with a rather large window of uncertainty.

Until such an event kills us all, or at least tanks civilization. We won't likely learn much from that one.