All we alone in the Universe?

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Two separate news items last week focused attention on one big question: are we alone in the universe?
First, physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a partnership to search for signs of life on other worlds. Then NASA revealed the discovery of an “Earth-like” planet within cosmic shouting distance. Central to both stories is this: are there other civilizations out there, or is our blue marble, with its surface skim of life, unique in the cosmos?
So far, the evidence suggests that we are alone. Despite years of listening to the heavens through initiatives such as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and despite a popular culture which virtually celebrates contact with “others”, we have not heard anything from “out there”, not a peep. In fact, that “not a peep” has a name: the Great Silence. The term was coined in the 1950s when a group of physicists was discussing what they considered the high probability of intelligent life existing on other planets. One of them, Nobel prize winner and physicist Enrico Fermi, is said to have blurted out “Where are they?” That question came to be known as the Fermi paradox or the Great Silence.
This is the problem in a nutshell: given the potential for intelligent life “out there”, why haven’t we heard anything? Scientists are puzzled, because the numbers don’t seem to add up. A formula called the Drake Equation estimates the number of potential Earth-like planets that could give rise to technologically advanced civilizations in our galaxy (the Milky Way). With an estimated 100 billion stars in the galaxy, most with multiple planets, the Drake Equation suggests there may be between 1,000 and 100,000,000 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way.