Hundreds of civilizations have failed in human history, yet we are still here and the general curve is upward as it has been since the first self-replicating ce

Hundreds of civilizations have failed in human history, yet we are still here and the general curve is upward as it has been since the first self-replicating cells were born on Earth. The Fermi Paradox explodes into a massive tree of possibilities. The truth is we just don't know. We haven't been looking very long or very far, and space is called space for a reason. Space could be "full" of complex intelligent life, but the definition of "full" for space could be an overall average of one intelligent artifact per cubic light year per million years. We haven't looked around enough to have any chance of spotting that. Radio SETI is kind of a joke; radiation diminishes with the square of distance so for us to detect a signal from another star it would have to be both intentionally beamed in our direction and incredibly powerful. They'd have to be screaming at us. Anything less than megawatts melts into cosmic microwave background before it reaches even the Centauri system, and anything with complex modulation just sounds like noise anyway. Long range detection of technosignatures is riddled with assumptions around what to look for. Dyson swarms? If you tame fusion you don't need a Dyson swarm. Megastructures? Those are fragile and unwieldy and lots of small objects might be better. Powerful propulsion systems on spacecraft? It would have to be aimed right at us. Etc. XKCD has the best Fermi paradox take: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/