When humanity began mindfully observing patterns during our development, it was only natural to one night look up at the sparkling sky and dream up constellations. It's not far-fetched to think that the stars shaped our lives according to when and where they appeared, and what we thought of them. Trying to solve the meaning of life, we brewed many inquiries about the nature of what may spread far above the deep azure. For many of those we discovered solutions and thus achieved progress; yet there are a few we never got around figuring out. Belonging to the latter category, one of our greatest unanswered questions can be paraphrased in many ways: are we on this planet, as a semi-conscious group, alone in the Universe? Are there other species in outer space, who pose Themselves with the same intrigue? Is life common throughout the Cosmos?
Given the recent discovery on Mars, we might find (traces of) life on the Red Planet. What mostly interests the common human, however, is not mere life that is outside of our planetary ecosystem, but life that has organized itself into some form of civilization or a comparable structure of sentience. A contact with such being(s) would prove to be one of the, if not the, most important events to take place in humanity's history.
The father of nuclear power, Enrico Fermi, had proposed His famous question "Where is everybody?", which gave birth to the famed Fermi Paradox. In short, this apparent paradox questions the puzzling clash of the relatively high likelihood of interstellar contact between developed beings, with the fact that we haven't experienced such a contact. Some decade later Frank Drake, a pioneer in extraterrestrial life research, came up with the Drake Equation, a probabilistic formula for estimating the number of other intelligent life capable of interstellar communication within the Milky Way. Its usefulness had been criticized many times over, although if it has at least some validity, then there should be at least two other such civilizations in our galaxy, regarding the latest estimates (valid during the time of writing this blog post).
So far we haven't noticed anyone. My expectation is that meeting any kind of intelligent extraterrestrial life with our current and estimated future capabilities is left to a pure twist of fate, since the scale of different barriers leaves us stranded between passion and unlikelihood. Some readers might find this post biased because of this conviction of mine – however I do assure You that it comes from the most eager of attempts in understanding the topic as much as an enthusiast can. To counter the effects of my doubt, I'm also presenting views that speak in favor of interstellar contact. In-depth descriptions of the most popular and related topics have been written by many other thinkers, so I encourage You, Reader, to broaden Your knowledge by bravely searching the vast Web. Furthermore, in this post I'm avoiding anything that might resemble conspiracy or any similar sighting theories. I am in strong disbelief towards such topics, but I'm in no position to fruitlessly argue against them, so let's just leave them at this.