[ofTheFountain]

>The potentially worrying question is: have we passed the Great Filter?

As a biologist I'd love it if they found life (that was totally seperate from Earth life) somewhere else in the solar system, but if we do it's one less great filter.

[simonh]

Oh no, that’s even worse. If life is ubiquitous in the universe, it means we would expect intelligent technological life to be even more common than otherwise. The absence of such civilisations, despite weak filters at the “low end” of the Drake equation, implies an even more dangerous and inescapable filter in the high end of the equation where we are now, that wipes out later stage civilizations.