Not to start a massive flame war, but just a personal opinion: I rather prefer humans to be the only intelligent species in the observable Universe - that means it will be all ours to play with.
It's only limiting if you're trying to reach C when traversing the spacetime. But if you're bending spacetime instead, there's no such limitation!
Monthy Python
Because unless we're missing something big, it would be clear that intelligence is either perpetually stuck in their own tiny tiny corner of the universe, or kill themselves off before they can reach the rest of the visible universe.
The following is dependent on the unknown likely duration to perfect evolution, and how it overlaps with unknown (but widely-assumed to be light-speed) travelling limits.
Given appropriate overlap distance of the two, there will inevitably arise the first civilisation to perform the following steps in order:
1) Attain self-mastery of internal planetary conflict and resource management. (Permanently sustainable peace and sustenance.)
2) Use their now abundance of time to perfect mastery of physics as is physically possible (something we know to have barely-conceivable limits in terms of size/scale etc).
3) Traverse the universe looking for any others, who - by not being the first - will therefore likely be behind them in terms of any conceivable aspect.
4) Immediately upon finding them, imprison them virtually in a seemingly "empty" but otherwise identical universe. This forces the same conditions upon them that were known to cause success, and also eliminates all risk of contamination of the existing peaceful equilibrium.
6) Wait.
7) The found species either:
a) achieves mastery of peace and sustainability, at which point contact is initiated as peaceful equals.
b) the species fails and dies.
8) Permanent universal peace is the only possible outcome, no matter how many times the above process is repeated.
Given the age of the universe, and how far we have come in such a short time, to me the above seems a likely resolution to the paradox.
With slight modification, it also explain various unexplained "contacts".
Perhaps the "virtual imprisonment period" does not ideally have a definitive binary on/off, instead is progressive in a reversible way (hence the lack of believability and proof for many "encounters"). Such non-invasive contact events may serve as research/assessment, and non-polluting "helping hands" for those who may be watching and waiting.
It would certainly appear we are very near (relatively speaking), to the point mastery of the physical world, making us likely virtual imprisonment and observation targets.
Whether we can do the peace and sustainability bit remains to be seen.
Frankly, us being the only/first sapient species is by far the most optimistic possibility.
I think by the time we colonize anything beyond alpha centuri, there are more of humanity living on o'neil cylinders than on any planet, and the people living on planet are the ones that desire to live somewhere 'wild'
The lack of any other intelligent life so far means that we have no evidence one way or another that we will succeed or fail. Better than if 100 million civilizations already tried and died.
Be quiet! They'll hear you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2j3nxz/radio_silen...
Perhaps it's not even a conscious decision on their part. Perhaps all our achievements, everything we are, isn't recognized amongst alien-kind beyond a short 1 line entry in an alien log file,. Perhaps their monitoring system detects and discards a thousand worthless blips like us every day.
What if we're just not that special
Only 5% of all matter is "regular" matter, and ~27% is dark matter which makes it be 85% of all mass but not of mass-energy since there is ~68% of dark energy.
It's the combination of dark matter + dark energy that makes for ~95% of the universe's total mass-energy.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#:~:text=In%20the%2....
It will be the single most monumental moment in human history.
For others, they’ve seen so many aliens in video games, TV shows, movies, etc. that they will be blasé about it and complain that the aliens in video game X looked more realistic than the real thing.
Others will be interested for a day or two, then will move onto the next new thing on the news cycle.
Others will be so self absorbed by social media that they will only care if they can use footage to make TikTok memes.
Others will be know it all’s that will want to point out to everyone that they always said there was extra terrestrial life and everyone should acknowledge how smart they are.
Others will see this as a great opportunity to write a book in the hopes of striking it rich.
Others are just trying to scrape by and are too worn down, tired, depressed, etc. to pay any attention.
Many people live subsistent lifestyles and don’t have access to news feed to even know it happened.
I would expect exceedingly few to really give this sort of event the acknowledgement it deserves.
If they share their technology, it could allow us to leap hundreds or thousands of years in the future within decades.
AI will advance faster than we can evolve and it will be their universe to play with, not ours.
That also means we need to survive here on Earth, and perhaps change as a species in various aspects in order to even make a small step of becoming an interplanetary and then, in long the run maybe even interstellar species.
We don't know if alien civilizations interfered a million years ago.