There's a fascinating piece by physicist-philosopher Nick Bostrom in MIT's Technology Review. Dr. Bostrom, of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, mulls over Fermi's Paradox: the conjecture that if intelligent life were common in the universe, then we humans should have seen signs of it by now.
(For example, given the number of stars in the observable universe, one or more species likely would have achieved interstellar travel, even if only by self-replicating robots, which arguably we should have encountered by now.)
That we have not detected signs of intelligent life elsewhere, says Bostrom, suggests that there is a Great Filter that has prevented life from making it that far into space. The filter could be that life itself is extremely hard to get started. That would be good news for us, inasmuch as we've already made it past that hurdle; it would mean that the Great Filter lies behind us in our existence as a species.
The bad news would be if life proved comparatively easy to start, but difficult to sustain long enough to colonize interstellar space. This implies that existential doom may well await us in the future.
And that, says Bostrom, is why:
... It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form--some bacteria, some algae--it would be bad news.
If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news.
The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly--but a bad omen for the future of the human race.
(Extra paragraphing added; hat tip: O'Reilly Radar.)
This is a major thought-provoker - definitely read it all.
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