Maybe given even 1,000,000 of observable universes the odds were just 1 out of 1,000,000.
How can people confidently claim that there must be some other civilizations, we wouldn't know the odds in the first place unless we know the exact mechanisms involved.
To me it seems like the probability could have been anything. It could have required any amount of certain chemical reactions to happen in certain order where the probability can vary wildly depending on the amount and likelihood of those reactions. E.g. it could be 0.01 to the power of 1,000,000 or as well as to the power of 10e64 and so on.
The point is that we do know some things about the universe and, given what we do know, we think the probability is high. So we're obviously missing something but we don't know what.
The thing that makes the Fermi Paradox so interesting is that every resolution is either interesting or implies something interesting.
How do we know that the probability isn't something like 0.01 to the power of some very large number, far higher than amount of total planets etc?
If we don't know the exact mechanism for all we know the odds could be infinitely low, even so low that even after billions of big bangs only 1 would have had life occurring anywhere at all and lower than that. Because maybe the first life form literally had to appear spontaneously from bruteforce chemical reactions with such low odds of ocurring.
Isnt the answer dead simple though? Space is mostly empty. Everything is very far away and getting even further as the universe expands. If there were bits of life scattered around the universe I wouldnt expect contact between them.
The paradox seems to rely on the assumption that if aliens existed they would have colonized the entire universe by now but that seems like a huge leap when we look at ourselves.
Universe is almost 14B years old. Life on earth is almost 4b years old. There have been several mass extinction events which almost completely whiped out life. There are planets in our system that may have had life but would have died off a very long time ago. Its kind of remarkable that we are here and how much progress we’ve made. We are certainly fitter than average (survivorship bias proves that). Yet we are nowhere even remotely close of expanding out into the solar system and beyond. And how could we, if virtually all of that space is void of resources we need to survive? Why is it inevitable that some alien would have solved that?
When you think about it, an interstellar starship that must expend mass to change velocity is going to have to make a severe tradeoff between mass and travel time. In practical terms you have to first build a colony that can sustain itself indefinitely in your own solar system before you build one that can also accelerate/decelerate to a million kph and doesn't have the advantage of being near a free source of energy or any sources of new materials.