The way I understand it, the whole “paradox” is more: If we aren’t the first culture-producing life, and if technological life is not an exceptionally rare occurence, and if technological life is persistent and not (almost) always fleeting - going by the age of other stars and their exoplanets in the galaxy, we would expect there to be signs of life visible in abundance (e.g. electromagnetic waves of clearly artificial origin as “background chatter”).
The fact that this isn’t so, indicates that something about that assumption has to be wrong. What exactly, we cannot easily say, and theories go all the way from “Life like humanity really is exceedingly rare and needs very special circumstances and ‘luck’” to “technological life quickly evolves to a point, where it doesn’t produce any signs like that” to “there is a great filter still ahead of us, which extinguishes life wherever it arises” to “life behaves according to Dark Forest rules and actively tries to stay hidden”.
But all of those are currently just wild speculation. The only thing certain is, that we have found none of the abundance of chatter we would expect from many worlds having had more time than our Earth to theoretically develop life akin to our own. And the most we so far have noticed are some sporadic signs that may hint at basic life, e.g. on K2-18b, but it is all in the “very fuzzy and uncertain” ballpark.
The way I understand it, the whole “paradox” is more: If we aren’t the first culture-producing life, and if technological life is not an exceptionally rare occurence, and if technological life is persistent and not (almost) always fleeting - going by the age of other stars and their exoplanets in the galaxy, we would expect there to be signs of life visible in abundance (e.g. electromagnetic waves of clearly artificial origin as “background chatter”).
The fact that this isn’t so, indicates that something about that assumption has to be wrong. What exactly, we cannot easily say, and theories go all the way from “Life like humanity really is exceedingly rare and needs very special circumstances and ‘luck’” to “technological life quickly evolves to a point, where it doesn’t produce any signs like that” to “there is a great filter still ahead of us, which extinguishes life wherever it arises” to “life behaves according to Dark Forest rules and actively tries to stay hidden”.
But all of those are currently just wild speculation. The only thing certain is, that we have found none of the abundance of chatter we would expect from many worlds having had more time than our Earth to theoretically develop life akin to our own. And the most we so far have noticed are some sporadic signs that may hint at basic life, e.g. on K2-18b, but it is all in the “very fuzzy and uncertain” ballpark.
I wasn’t primarily discussing the paradox as a whole, just the tiny issue presented here.
Two things to add