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The Milky Way Galaxy may be home to alien civilizations, but according to a new study there is a strong probability that most of them are dead - and their own progression led to their demise. The statement comes from researchers with NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology and Santiago High School who used an updated version of an equation to calculate the likely existence of intelligent life and determined aliens may have emerged some eight billion years after our galaxy formed. With these results, the team included the idea that progress of science and technology inevitably leads to the destruction of civilizations and because humans have yet to make contact outside our planet, scientists now think they know why. ‘We found the potential self-annihilation to be highly influential in the quantity of galactic intelligent life,’ reads the study in arxiv . ‘If intelligent life is likely to destroy themselves, it is not surprising that there is little or ...

During the siege of Leningrad, a group of Russian botanists holed up in a secret vault starved to death rather than consume the greatest collection of seeds they were guarding for a post-apocalyptic world. Worse, Nikolay Vavilov, the man who had collected the seeds, also died of hunger in Stalin’s gulag. In September 1941, when German forces began their siege of Leningrad, choking food supply to the city’s two million residents, one group of people preferred to starve to death despite having plenty of ‘food.’ As the invading Germans poured into the city (now St Petersburg), scientists and workers at the Institute of Plant Industry barricaded themselves inside their vaults . They weren’t trying to save their lives but rather the future of humanity. For, they had the unenviable task of protecting the greatest seed collection in the world from both hungry Soviet citizens and the rampaging German Army. As the siege dragged out for 900 days, one by one these heroic men started dying of hung...