I always struggled with Fermi paradox. We've been floating through insanely vast universe for laughably short time and to me its just bizarre to assert that if we couldn't find evidence of other civilizations so far, that for sure means we're the only intelligent species there is.
As much as I appreciate Fermi's work, this is something I can't at all agree with.
1 - we think that a highly advanced alien civilisation would build massive startships that move at increadible speeds, Radio beacons that signal to alien civilisations, dyson spheres, etc. These things would be massive, easy to detect, and stick out like a sore thumb.
2 - with our instruments, we can observe vast swathes of space, many galaxies, quite precisely. So it appears that no highly advanced alien civilisation is in our galaxy or the nearby galaxies
3 - Even at our technology level, If we wanted to signal out into the void on purpose, we could signal quite far - thousands of lightyears, and if we wanted to target a particular star we could signal precisely with a large laser and that signal would be detectable across most of the galaxy.
So it stands to reason that there is no civilisation similar to ours in the near couple hundred lightyears and that there is no advanced civilisation, the way we envision them, in our or nearby galaxies. It could be that everyone is hiding, or our idea of advanced civilisation is wrong. Or anytthing else really. That;s hwy it's a paradox/
One obvious answer is that any civilization that is advanced enough to be at the dyson sphere level probably has no problem hiding their existence from humanity if they want to.
I assume that any advanced civilization has already created AI that is several orders of magnitude smarter than humans (and able to think ceaselessly, without being tired etc.)
At that point, it seems fairly trivial to do direct things like messing with the very small number of telescopes and other methods of detection that we have rather than actually trying to hide by coordinating the entire civ to act a certain way.
There's no reason to believe that "being really smart" lets you do things better, much less that it gives you magic powers over other people's telescopes. Evil superintelligent AI deities are inventions of people whose egos are attached to the idea that they're the "most intelligent" and don't want to lose the title they gave themselves.
As much as I appreciate Fermi's work, this is something I can't at all agree with.