One of the professors in my department when I was a grad student in astronomy was a vegetarian because of the Fermi Paradox. His reasoning was that intelligent

One of the professors in my department when I was a grad student in astronomy was a vegetarian because of the Fermi Paradox. His reasoning was that intelligent life probably doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe and so a chicken is one of the most intelligent life forms in the universe. And given ~100 million years of evolution it could even become as intelligent as a human. Another professor I knew thought that the Fermi Paradox implied that interstellar space travel was probably too difficult an engineering problem to ever be solved. I got the sense that a lot of astronomers (though probably not a majority) have strong opinions about the Fermi Paradox, but they only rarely discuss them. It's one of those weird problems where there's some data --- enough to reason out some conjectures --- but not enough to really make any definitive conclusions. But because the answer you end up with has such profound consequences you feel obligated to at least try to make the most of the little data you have. I guess in Bayesian terms, it's one of those situations where the priors you put in basically determine the answer you get out --- if you disagree about the priors, you'll disagree about the conclusions.