Nick Bostrom of Oxford University has written a damn interesting paper arguing that finding traces of alien life would be a very bad omen for humanity. He accepts the Fermi Paradox as a paradox and makes some very interesting deductions regarding a ‘Great Filter’ preventing the rise of space faring alien civilizations.
Read the paper. (Really).
And here’s a reddit thread about the paper which points out some of the unstated assumptions.
Other related things of interest:
- Video of Michio Kaku arguing that SETI’s hitherto corroboration of the null hypothesis does not reinforce the Fermi Paradox.
- Wikipedia entry for Nick Bostrom
- The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. A superb short story about the inevitability presented by entropy.
- Wikipedia entry on the Great Filter hypothesis.
- Wikipedia entry on Von Neumann probes.