The Fermi Paradox doesn’t necessarily hypothesise that there isn’t any life out there, it just raises the questions that follow from the apparent absence. Sure, there could be primitive life out there, and there probably has been out there long before us, but what prevented it taking that next step beyond it’s own planet/solar system.
A civilisation like us with even a million year head start, let alone the potential billions of years, “should” leave signs such as a dyson sphere, detectable signs from it’s own environment or span across vast parts of the galaxy. Of course, it could have discovered capitalism, and that the return on investment in a single lifetime, or multiple generations, didn’t warrant the effort.
It is also supplemented by the absence of the von Neumann probe.
It’s all quite fascinating, but irrelevant of course if we are actually in a simulation.
