Written as if he'd just heard of the Fermi Paradox last week. His thinking, broken down to basics, goes like this: IF - life evolves easily THEN - obviously every form of life should colonize the stars and start screaming out onto the hydrogen band looking for friends THEREFORE - the fact that we haven't heard from anyone is proof positive we're alone and if we're alone, it's because either we survived a giant cataclysm that wiped everyone else out OR a great cataclysm is waiting to wipe us out ANY DAY NOW. Yeah, he's got three footnotes but that doesn't make this piece anything but over-reaching sophistry. Stephen Webb listed no less than FIFTY solutions to the Fermi Paradox that do not involve an empty universe: http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Aliens-Everybody-Solutions-Ex... A few off the top of my head: 1) SETI research tends to focus on the assumption that other civilizations are leaking their communication out into the universe the way we do. Except we don't really any more. And haven't since the early 80s. So really, we're looking for a signature of communication that we ourselves only used for about 60 years. 2) In a universe of unlimited resources the only new thing under the sun is culture and culture is less valuable when it has been contaminated by existing culture, therefore the only benefit humanity has to offer the universe is our culture once it's matured and that hasn't happened yet 3) Physicality may very well be a temporary condition of civilization and once a civilization disappears into the singularity why would they bother attempting to communicate with unenlightened bags of blood? Just as an aside, intensity of energy radiated diminishes with distance at the cube. That's why we've been using tight beam and cable communication since Marconi. Yeah, you can put up an antenna and pick up KROK from ten miles away, but the same antenna needs to be ten times as sensitive twenty miles away and a hundred times as sensitive thirty miles away. And considering in space we're more worried about "parsecs" than "miles", it doesn't take long to calculate that any SETI project involves presuming that an alien civilization is expending Apollo Program-grade resources pointing a collimated energy beam directly at us with the explicit intent of saying "hello" across the gap. And when you look at it that way, the answer to "why aren't we hearing them" becomes "because space is really, really, REALLY damn empty." One more note: both the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation were created for one reason: we have absolutely no idea how to calculate the magnitude of this problem. The Fermi Paradox was Enrico Fermi illustrating that we don't even know enough about the problem to ask intelligent questions, and the Drake Equation was Frank Drake rebutting by the seat of his pants that intelligent life is so inevitable that even with everything completely unknown it's still worth looking for... PURELY to book time on a new telescope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#History Nick Bostrom may know a crapload about "humanity" but I for one am not convinced he even cares to learn about "non-humanity."