I agree that there must be other stuff living out there, but I don’t think they’re here. My belief that I can’t prove is that the Fermi paradox has a simple but quite depressing solution: that space and time are just too big and there’s no special undiscovered way of getting around it. I’m sure there are some staggeringly unlikely situations out there somewhere where two species have evolved independently at the same time to a similar level of intelligence at a distance close enough to reach each other, but for the vast majority of intelligent life the odds are so vanishingly small that they might as well be alone.

If we’re a typical example of an intelligent species, for example, we’ve been capable of space flight for less that a century and we just about got as far as the moon, and with all the inventions that came along with becoming capable of space flight we’ve almost destroyed ourselves countless times. It’s kind of a wonder we’re still here at all, and with climate change who knows how much longer we’ll last? TBH I think the best we can hope for is to maybe get a radio signal from some ancient place that’s probably long gone, and send one back knowing we’ll probably be long gone by the time it gets there.