I find the Fermi Paradox leaves out a very important factor which must be considered. The speed of light. (This might alleviate some of that existential crisis)
Consider that SETI has only been functional since 1960. We have been broadcasting radio waves into space since almost exactly 100 years ago. Do you know how far those radio waves have reached till now?
Seriously. We have announced our capabilities as a technological and sentient species to such a tiny tiny fragment of a fraction of the galaxy (let alone the universe as a whole). Also consider that we no longer broadcast as much as we used to into space. Using the ionosphere to bounce off radio waves is OLD tech. Almost nobody uses that anymore.
So essentially, we spent about 50-60 years being a radio-noisy planet (in a fairly limited frequency range) and we expect advanced civilizations to rush to us and roll out a red carpet? It's the equivalent of a teenager on youtube uploading five videos about how terrible her day at school was, stopping uploading for a month, and then wondering why she isn't getting thousands of likes and turning into the next Beiber.
To be noticed, we would need alien life forms to be looking in the right direction, in the right frequency range, and be well within range of that 200 light-year bubble. Either that, or we would need to be patient and stop giving up before we've barely started.
The light-year problem extends the other way too. Alien civilizations may be swarming over vast tracts of our milky way for far longer than ten thousand years, and we might not be aware of it because the milky way itself is over one hundred thousand light-years in diameter. So the further we see into space, the further back we are seeing into time as well. The images we get from the opposite side of the galaxy are 100,000 years old. To give you some sense of time, 100,000 years ago, humans as a species was just beginning to crawl out of Africa. We had no concept of agriculture or anything of the sort. Proper agriculture was 90,000 years AFTER that. Look at all we've achieved in 10,000 years, and that is despite stuff like the dark ages setting us back 2000 years mysticism and superstition and other stupid hurdles. In the time that light takes to travel to us from just outside our local neighborhood, entire alien civilizations could rise up, die, and rise anew. But the Fermi-Paradox writes all of this off so easily.
Looking at our 200 light-year bubble again. There are only about 500 G-type stars in this bubble. As of 2005, we had only found planets around 28 of them. I'm sure we have found a whole bunch more since then, but even then, we are just BEGINNING to probe at space.
It is far too early to feel despair. It is far too early to let defeatist concepts like the Fermi Paradox guide our understanding of our universe.
