Fermi Paradox

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-alien-life.html
In a recent thread on Mars water I proposed that a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox was that extraterrestrial intelligence might be like us in terms of probably never needing to go any place else.  Our population may be decreasing by 2050 if we can improve the standard of living in the 3rd world enough by that time.  Some of most well off populations are already in decline.  There is no reason to colonize another solar system.  Everything we need will last us in this one until our star goes through it's red giant aging issues, and we can likely be able to survive that billions of years from now by building habitats out on the fringes of our solar system.  The human race doesn't seem to be far sighted enough to worry about some solar activity wiping out life in this solar system to go to the bother and expense to set up a colony in another solar system.  Our whole galaxy might be in trouble if Andromeda does collide with the Milky Way.
The Phys.org article has three solutions to the Fermi paradox: exceptionality, annihilation, and communication barriers.
Intelligent life may just be very rare in this universe.  Life was stalled out on single celled lifeforms for around 3 billion years before multicellular life evolved.  It could just as easily been stalled out for another 3 billion years or until our star becomes a red giant and destroys life in this solar system.  Given our own experience of shifting around as single celled life for 3 billion years.  How long would the transition take to do it somewhere else?  It took 8 billion years of star deaths to create the elements that made life possible in this solar system.  How long did it take somewhere else that was suitable for sustaining life after it had evolved.  You need to have a suitable planet created in a star poor region of the galaxy so that the deaths of neighboring stars would not extinguish any life that managed to get started.  Active stellar regions that exist closer to the center of our galaxy are not places that you would expect life to survive for very long if it ever got started.  We are currently on the edge of one of the spiral arms of our galaxy.  If we were in a region of the spiral arm more densely packed with stars life would probably not have survived 3 billion years to evolve multicellular lifeforms.
Maybe it is the destiny of most intelligent life to over exploit their resources and destroy themselves.  We could still do that, but it doesn't look like it is going to happen.  The same self centered attitude that brought us to the brink of destroying life on earth is going to prevent us from doing it, and is likely the reason that we may never leave our solar system.  We can live happily here for billions of years.
The least likely is communication barriers.  The article claims things like Star Trek's prime directive as keeping other intelligent life forms from contacting us.  The simple fact is that the Star Trek fantasy universe may never be possible.  We need warp drive, and Star Trek claims to use antimatter, but they use tremendous amounts of antimatter.   Just think of how much antimatter is needed to produce the matter in food replicators.  Transporters apparently work by disassembling things, storing the information in a transporter buffer and then reassembling the matter.  Just think of how much antimatter it took to reassemble Worf every episode.  Scotty survived in the transporter computer buffer for decades until rescue.  There just may not be any aliens zipping around the galaxy to communicate with us.  They may all be subject to relativistic limits, and it just isn't worth going someplace else if every thing you knew is long in the past if you ever get back.  Any exploration of significant distance is a one way trip into the future. There are no 5 year missions possible in this universe at this time.  If you could accelerate fast enough to explore at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and got back in 5 years (your time), by the time you got back a couple centuries may have passed on earth.  Wiki claims that a constant 1 g acceleration would allow someone to cross the known universe in 1 lifetime, but my guess is that our solar system would no longer exist at the end of that journey.
Ron Okimoto