My spiritual education... took place at a Unitarian Church. The theme was "many paths to the truth." …even the inconsistencies were illuminating. It … - Raymond Kurzweil

There have been attempts to respond to the so-called Fermi Paradox (which, granted, is a paradox only if one accepts the optimistic parameters that most observers apply to the Drake equation). One common response is that a civilization may obliterate itself once it reaches radio capability. This explanation might be acceptable if we were talking about only a few such civilizations, but with the common SETI assumptions implying billions of them, it is not credible to believe that everyone of them destroyed itself.

Order... is information that fits a purpose.

It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace. And that is what we will experience as we enter the twenty-first century.