The Fermi Paradox isn't really questioning the existence of extraterrestrial life so much as questioning interstellar travel. Maybe it's just too hard to do it. Maybe you don't need to because you have the vast riches of an entire solar system to breed in.
(For all their smarts, humans behave like every other animal or microbe: exhausting food supply at an exponential rate like a person with no impulse control. Maybe that dooms us)
Maybe FTL attempts opens portals to Hells or some other popular fiction: multiverses, dream roads, supernovae? And STL just takes too damn long or, if you can live in multigenerational ships, you no longer need worlds to colonize.
Although my favored solution? Intelligence is self-destructive. Earth has had at least five great extinction events. There's no evidence of intelligent life, or at least artifactual life, of being a cause. But there's no reason not. I guess I have to find evidence, don't I?
Let's pretend I'm right. Assume each extinction was caused by a self-doomed technological civilization.
The Ordovician/Silurian Event, from which the popular Silurian Hypothesis theorizing past intelligent creatures on Earth before humans, was caused by the sqwuids cuttlefish and octopus and such, who built a number of bases on the inner planets and asteroids before they left Sol. Yes, they trashed Earth, just as we are doing. TV Show? My Favorite Mollusca about a Silurian octopus monster that sounds like Jackie Mason.
The Devonian Event, war of the fish peoples. Sponge Bob. Still some Squidwards hanging around.
The Permian Event, war of the lizard peoples. Although honestly, no. The Earth is a dangerous planet, as the dyings of Permian/Triassic/Jurassic show in stone. Can't really make a justification for lizard people.
The K-T Event, war of the bird people. Fed up, one side let loose a fist of god and clobbered our future Yucatan. Bird people might still be around. Bird people discovered the silurian squid bases on the Moon &c and modified them enough that even astronauts could open them. That's what happened.
Ok, here's another movie idea, John Carpenter's sequel to The Thing. Global warming has thawed out both the Thing at the South Pole and the Blob at the North Pole. Now you might ask, wasn't Santa supposed to be looking out after the Blob? Is that asking too much from that jolly old elf? Well, we are going to find out in The Blob vs The Thing.
The Blob is a slime-mold metaphor of us, you and me, yes, we are the Blob. When it comes to consciousness, the connectionists appear to win. The Blob will take over the Northern hemisphere rapidly. Meanwhile, in Antarctica the Thing has thawed out. My pitch to John Carpenter is Kurt Russell is a Thing, but knows he is a Thing and is pissed off he's a Thing and wants to fight the Thing. This conflict is interrupted when the government types show up (ala Escape from New York) to tell Thing Kurt Russell about the Blob. Thng Kurt Russell and the Thing agree to exterminate the Blob but it means most people will have to become Things.
Damn I wish Donald Pleasance were still alive, but with these cheap reverse engineered mini brains called AI, we have deep fakes for all that.
How do we get Kurt Russell to win against The Blob and The Thing? By sacrificing himself duh! No sequel. Only prequels. Which, since people understand What If is now, is: plenty o stories.
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