How about space and time are really, really big and due to the speed of light all we are looking at is the briefest sliver of randomly selected time (if a star

How about space and time are really, really big and due to the speed of light all we are looking at is the briefest sliver of randomly selected time (if a star is 15,000 light years away we’re looking at a sliver of time 50 years long 15,000 years ago). They could be a mirror civilization to ours and we’d never perceive each other. That’s true of a civilization even a couple hundred light years away! We could have near neighbors and we’d have no idea. Turn it around and consider who we are visible to. We’ve been transmitting for 75 years. So our signal may have reached a sphere 75 light years in diameter. Out of several billion. Given that our civilization has faced existential catastrophe at least 5 times in that period it’s safe to say we’ll be transmitting for the briefest sliver of galactic time. We’ll be utterly invisible to most of the universe. If a species is too far away or too early or late, they simply won’t see the the brief flash of information we transmit. And the same goes for us seeing them. It’s not a paradox, we just forgot how small and insignificant we are.