David Martel wrote:

Martin,

   You lost me with the first sentence. What is an "advanced civilization"? What is an "advanced technology"? When you start off from undefined but cool sounding buzzwords it is easy to reason (badly) to just about any conclusion.

Sorry about that. Yes, I haven't defined it. In the book Kurtzweil postulates the
law of accelerated returns, which states that technology will grow exponentially
in complexity. We are currently at the point where the growth really takes off, and
in maybe 30-50 years we will be this advanced civilization, capable of building
microscopic spaceships. This law could be valid for other civilizations too. Hope that's more clear.
 I'm not sure of the relation to SETI which claims to be

searching for "intelligence" ( another undefined buzzword ).

Well, when giving a solution to something, it would be nice to confirm it
somehow. It's difficult to do here with undetectable spaceships. So in order
to detect "intelligence" (an civilization capable of sending a radio signal
towards earth is intelligent), the best we can do is to listen after some
signal. This solution to the Fermi paradox suggests intelligent life could be
common in the Galaxy. Of course if they only want to observe and gather
information, they will not send us a signal, but hopefully some will.
Or else we need to travel to the stars and observe, which we can in 30-50 years,
hopefully.

   Is this Kurzweil from MIT? Is the book any good?

Yes it is. Interview:
http://www.cio.com/archive/101504/interview.html

Yes the book is good, although there's a lot of bad translation in my book (danish).
It's written in 1999 and he makes predictions for the year 2009. Technology seems
to be on track for them to come true.

A new book is coming in march 2005:
"The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology"

Martin.