> reasonable response to the Fermi paradox, though I agree it's a pretty stupid one That leaves us with a very peculiar subset of certain values of "reasonable

> reasonable response to the Fermi paradox, though I agree it's a pretty stupid one That leaves us with a very peculiar subset of certain values of "reasonable". There is nothing wrong in principle arguing that there might be something wrong with our general galactic neighborhood, without touching the Copernican principle at all. For a random example, a local population of Von Neumann drones killing all technology-using civilizations wouldn't hold any especially deep cosmological problems. There is also the small matter of us not knowing a lot about pretty much every single factor involved with Fermi's equation, so this leaves a lot of room for us simply living within a empty patch. Personally, I have to admit the Fermi paradox bothers me, as I've written before here on HN. But there is an infinite supply of imaginable reasons that don't require paranormal intervention, so I don't see the need to actually consider those other reasons at the moment.