Fermi Paradox

To a great extent the quality of our lives depends on the amount of knowledge that is available to us.  One way for this to expand very quickly would be for us to come into contact with civilization on some other planet.  We do not have much information to go on to tell us how likely we are to find such a civilization.  If we were to come into contact with such a civilization this would give us information not only from that civilization, but it is possible that they might have information about others.

In any case we have to deal with the Fermi paradox.  That is if extraterrestrial life is common, why haven't they reached us yet.  This would be good evidence that either complex life is not common or there is no effective method of interstellar travel.  I suspect that the latter is true.  Our current understanding of Physics rules out faster than light travel.  I doubt future research will change this.

I should point out that our own world has been here for roughly 4.5 billion years if scientists are correct.  It is only during the last few decades that we have conceivably been able to communicate.  Assuming the existence of extraterrestrial civilization, it is quite likely that they have little reason to believe that attempting to contact us would yield fruitful results.

The most advanced life or civilization on other worlds is likely to be either much less or much more advanced than us.  A civilization might attempt communication with others when they first developed the capability, but they are likely to either succeed or fail quickly.  They would quickly establish contact with other such civilizations should they exist.  If they do not at that point they would conclude that such civilizations are rare and give up the search.  In the event that they succeed they would very likely figure that attempting to establish contact with civilizations where such attempts failed in the past would not yield much benefit.  They would be busy processing all of the information they obtained from successful attempts.

Any civilization that has just obtained the capability to communicate in this way would likely be more primitive than those that had already established such capability.  It would therefore be likely that in the more advanced civilization most of the individuals would figure that since the more primitive civilization would benefit more from the contact, they would wait for them to make an attempt at contact.  Evidence that such an attempt was made would be the only way they would have of knowing that the more primitive civilization was technologically capable of interstellar communication.