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.