I felt that the Strossian "Bandwidth Explanation" (from Accelerando, a not-great novel but a cornucopia of ideas) for the Fermi paradox honestly made more sense

I felt that the Strossian "Bandwidth Explanation" (from Accelerando, a not-great novel but a cornucopia of ideas) for the Fermi paradox honestly made more sense than just about anything else I've heard. The further you are from your planet, the dumber you get . . or, more precisely, the smaller / slower your mind is. So most stick close to the gravity wells and low-latency areas. Anything that can store data in Planck lengths, that's going to be completely imperceptible, something built into the structure of the universe. Might as well listen to digits of Pi like in Contact.