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I suppose there will be more people thinking about it now, after Cixin Liu published his book about it.

For sure. It was the first time I saw it articulated so well.

It was articulated so well in the dark forest that I have trouble seeing it any other way now.

There could be many explanations for us not hearing from extraterrestrials. I think you are falling in a cognitive bias trap of having learned too much about one of the reasons and thus assigning it higher probability. Memory is associative, so the more you know about something, more likely you are to use that concept when trying to solve problems or explain mysteries.

To ameliorate that I would suggest reading up on other theories. For example great filter or simulation argument.

Those theories are also too exciting (and hence likely to be overbelieved).

A more mundane reason might be that interstellar travel and communication turns out to be impossible (or near enough).

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