Not just bacteria would survive; various other organisms could survive a nuclear war. If intelligence is an inevitable outcome of evolution (this is contentious, as we shall see later, but is presumably the viewpoint of those who argue there are a million ETCs in the Galaxy) then the wait for intelligence to emerge after a nuclear holocaust wouldn’t be endless: a few hundreds of millions of years, perhaps. This is an unimaginably vast reach of time on a human scale, but, again, it’s not particularly significant when compared to the age of the Galaxy.
