>> The signs of alien civilizations are everywhere, but humans cannot perceive or understand it > As for signs of alien civilization being everywhere, here I h

>> The signs of alien civilizations are everywhere, but humans cannot perceive or understand it > As for signs of alien civilization being everywhere, here I have to respectfully disagree. This is all speculation, of course, but that's all we have. This particular answer to the Fermi Paradox goes like this: Human reasoning and interests are entirely circumscribed by our perception. We are capable only of dimly imagining that other kinds of perception and reasoning exist, but not imagining what or how that might be. Our fictional aliens are (necessarily) only ourselves in disguise. If other strategies or sentient processes are possible, we will be unable to recognize them as such*. It's not necessarily that alien civilizations are "smarter" or more "advanced", but so different that we wouldn't even recognize them as sentient. We humans will no doubt, assuming our current state of knowledge endures, create Dyson swarms all over the local cluster, but that is a strategic inevitability given the best of our current understanding; an understanding that, again, is circumscribed by our bodies and minds and perceptions, which in turn are the result of specific evolutionary pressures. There is no reason to expect that these specific pressures uniquely equip us to grasp the entirety of this vastly complicated cosmology in which we find ourselves. "Assuming our current state of knowledge endures" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. How likely is it that 1,000 or 10,000 years of research and increasingly sophisticated understanding of ourselves and our Universe would lead to Dyson as being our best option? Personally, I think unlikely, but who knows? There are too many mysteries and unknowns for us humans to be too certain about anything cosmological or metaphysical. Way, way too many unknown unknowns. * Unless aliens are close enough "like us" to be recognizable, but this is exactly my argument: this answer to the Fermi Paradox is that our perception and reasoning ability gives us such a thin slice of understanding the Universe that we have less chance of grasping "alien civilization" than grasshoppers have of understanding how bats "hop". Our dominance of Earth gives us a kind of provincial self-confidence that we understand everything important, but really, that is unlikely.