Stephen Hawking's recent admonishment about searching for and then contacting extraterrestrial life reminded me of the late great Carl Sagan. Sagan's Cosmos presented astronomy, physics and the history of science in a way that captured some of the minds of the best geeks of my generation. It was from this series and the companion book, that I first learned about the Drake Equation, which postulates how many other electromagnetically enabled and possibly communicating civilizations there may be in the Milky Way galaxy, which according to the SETI League, is estimated to be about 10,000.
The contrary to the Drake Equation is the Fermi Paradox, which basically states: if there are so many intelligent civilizations out there, why haven't we encountered them? This paradox was apparently expounded by Fermi in the 1950 almost 10 years before Drake's equation was first formally formulated.
I thought a really great Cold War reason why we may have not encountered or contacted extraterrestrial life is that highly technologically advanced societies may have a tendency to destroy themselves!
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