Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

Months ago, researchers at Duke University came up with a type of cloaking metamaterial. What this basically is according to Discovery News is:

“A metamaterial is a material with unique properties that derive from its physical structure, not its chemical make up. To manipulate light, the microscopic surface of a material must be much smaller than that of the wave length of light being used.”

Fermi paradox

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.

The extreme age of the universe and its vast number of stars suggest that if the Earth is typical, extraterrestrial life should be common.<1> In an informal discussion in 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi questioned why, if a multitude of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist in the Milky Way galaxy, evidence such as spacecraft or probes are not seen. A more detailed examination of the implications of the topic began with a paper by Michael H. Hart in 1975, and it is sometimes referred to as the Fermi-Hart paradox.<2> Another closely related question is the Great Silence<3>—even if travel is hard, if life is common, why don't we detect their radio transmissions?

There have been attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox by locating evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, along with proposals that such life could exist without human knowledge. Counterarguments suggest that intelligent extraterrestrial life does not exist or occurs so rarely that humans will never make contact with it.

GliderGuider: The explanation I favour is the following:

Technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or space flight technology. Possible means of annihilation include nuclear war, biological warfare or accidental contamination, nanotechnological catastrophe, ill-advised physics experiments,<29>, a badly-programmed super-intelligence, or a Malthusian catastrophe after the deterioration of a planet's ecosphere. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in mainstream scientific theorizing.<30> Indeed, there are probabilistic arguments which suggest that humanity's end may occur sooner rather than later. In 1966 Sagan and Shklovskii suggested that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales.<31> Self-annihilation may also be viewed in terms of thermodynamics: insofar as life is an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, the "external transmission" or interstellar communicative phase may be the point at which the system becomes unstable and self-destructs.<32>

From a Darwinian perspective, self-destruction would be a paradoxical outcome of evolutionary success. The evolutionary psychology that developed during the competition for scarce resources over the course of human evolution has left the species subject to aggressive, instinctual drives. These compel humanity to consume resources, increase longevity, and to reproduce — in part, the very motives that led to the development of technological society. It seems likely that intelligent extraterrestrial life would evolve similarly and thus face the same possibility of self-destruction. And yet, for species self-destruction to provide a good answer to Fermi's Question, it would have to be very nearly universal. That is, this possibility would have a probability of very nearly 1.0. It has been suggested that a successful alien species would be a superpredator, as is Homo sapiens.<33>

This argument does not require the civilization to entirely self-destruct, only to become once again non-technological. In other ways it could persist and even thrive according to evolutionary standards, which postulates survival as the sole goal of life - not "progress," technology or even intelligence.