Starts With a Bang is the most readable science blog out there. There. I said it. And he has a great post up called, “Where is everybody?” about why we haven’t made contact with another civilization yet.

It’s tempting to think that with all the exoplanets–planets orbiting stars other than our own–being discovered these days (there are 552 known as of two days ago) that our galaxy and the universe is teeming with life. It should be easy to find another civilization. It’s what’s known as Fermi’s Paradox and Starts with a Bang explains, with a lot of beautiful pictures, why it’s not actually a paradox

The end of the post has an interesting reason for why we should keep looking:

There’s too much to know, too much to gain, and too much to learn for us to not ask these questions. Some would have you fear the unknown, but any civilization that talks to us will likely have been around — as you can tell from the estimates — in a technologically advanced state for thousands or years, if not hundreds of thousands (or more). When you think of all the social and political problems that we’ve solved (and are solving now) just over the past few hundred years, and the hurdles we have coming up over the next few hundred (including population, pollution, energy, resource management, human rights, and more), any civilization that talks to us has likely already solved those problems.

I’m not sure how much advice we would actually get on these topics (who knows? Maybe a lot!) but I do think that just the knowledge that civilization exists outside Earth would be enough to bring humanity a little closer together.

Here’s the beginning of the movie Contact (written by Carl Sagan) showing us where we live in this universe: