Are We Alone? Hopefully.

Expatriot reader Darren reports from Thailand that Nick Bostrom, the director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute (I now know where I'll go to grad school if I ever decide to go) hopes that we find no evidence of past or present extra-terrestrial life on Mars, or anywhere for that matter.

No, this guy is not a space-hater. In fact, he is a space-lover, and has high hopes for the future of human inter-galactic colonization. According to him, "the silence of the night sky is golden, and that in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news". How so, you may ask? Because the lack of evidence of intelligent life, or any life for that matter, gives weight to the theory that humans are exceptional in the fact that we have overcome billions upon billions of potential evolutionary dead-ends, and have passed through the so-called "Great Filter", allowing us to take the next great step into the stars. The other option is that we have not yet encountered the Great Filter, and that it will take the much more exciting form of some sort of "existential risk", i.e.:

"a nuclear war fought with arms stockpiles much larger than today's (perhaps resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug; environmental disaster; an asteroid impact; wars or terrorist acts committed with powerful future weapons; super­intelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; or high-energy physics experiments"

I'm placing my bets on the 'superintelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals' based upon the prevalence of sinister-robot-related news that has been showing up on PS lately.