Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, hopes the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

He says a finding of some form of ET life might be a sign, in combination with the lack of any known communication so far from ET, that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some technology–perhaps some very powerful weapons technology–that prevents the emergence of a space-colonizing civilization, and causes its extinction.

And that could be our future if the “Great Filter” (one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems) is still ahead of us.