We all know the answer to Fermi’s Paradox, but it’s our not accepting what we know which is in itself “the Great Filter”.
What space-faring alien civilisation would bother to contact us at all, when in so doing it would be expected to provide an answer which we already know? A simple answer, that we’re not ready to accept, and that any successful technological civilisation would know from its own experience we must learn for ourselves. The understanding itself, “The Prime Directive” (see, I told you we already know it) is a requisite for survival of any technological intelligence on any world — is it safe to assume any such tech-intelligence would have evolved on a non-technological “Natural World”, which must then be though of as the first (in fact “formative”) Primitive Being they learned not to “interfered with”?
The great Gene Roddenberry had to present this truth that we already know as “science fiction”, because our visceral attachment to exploitation of this planet, and of each other, causes us to reject things like his “Prime Directive” as unrealistic (though inconvenient is the proper term), and he had to indulge our “institutional need” to dehumanise and exploit each other by inventing Klingons and Romulans.
Space is big. Really, Really Big! So I’m not saying space itself isn’t a sufficient filter to disallow other civilisations — happily wandering “out there”; safely by design, and unchallenged because space is so big and “territory” is… also self-designed; and perhaps they’re living in great self-contained spinning wheels, but most likely exploring at speeds far below that of light — from encountering us. Even if “encountering” only means listening in on our own light speed, and very recent in fact, electromagnetic transmissions. What I’m saying is such space-faring civilisations would have learned, of necessity, that allowing “others” to learn for themselves is the natural order of things. As is suffering the consequences when we don’t learn the survival value of such understandings as, say, the fundamental lack of “otherness” among beings with technologically extendable bodies. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/about-extremophile-choice/
