This is how to avoid annihilating ourselves in a nuclear war

The good news is that we might be about to solve the Fermi paradox. Many have long suspected that the reason why there don’t seem to be millions of talkative aliens out there in space is that, when an intelligent civilisation develops the technology to enable interstellar communication, it also develops weapons that enable it to quickly destroy itself.

So far, we are matching this trajectory. We have sent probes beyond the solar system – and vast quantities of electronic data fizzing in all directions at the speed of light – but we have also got thousands of thermonuclear weapons…