The more I think about the Fermi paradox, the less interesting it gets. The great filter isn’t necessary. It’s just the distances.
The distances don’t account for the complete, total lack of evidence, though. Our civilization is detectable to dozens of light years at least, if you’re looking. And we are looking. So, the others… Where are they?
Well, presumably more than a few dozen light years away. A few dozen lightyears is nothing on a cosmic scale.
There are habitable planets orbiting about one in five stars. So a few hundred habitable worlds in that range. Why do none of them transmit?
Right, a few dozen light-years is like… Less than a rounding error lol. The Milky Way galaxy alone is like 100,000 light years across, and around 1000 light years thick. If we treat the Milky Way as a cylinder, that’s a volume of roughly 8 trillion cubic light years to sift through.
Granted, a cylinder is a massively naive simplification for calculating the volume of the galaxy and probably way overestimates things. But even dropping that estimate down several orders of magnitude, billions, or even millions of cubic light years is still an unimaginably large region to search for life. And that’s just one galaxy. There’s billions of galaxies (that we know of), and some are even bigger than the Milky Way. Searching through all of that for life, especially when we don’t really know exactly what to look for, is a hilariously huge task.
