The answer to Fermi's paradox revealed

Physicist Enrico Fermi is well known for posing a famous paradox now named after him, the question that if life in the universe is (presumably) not uncommon, "Where is everybody?"

Fermi had calculated that once any species in the Milky Way achieved the capability to travel through space, it would be able to reach every extent of the galaxy in five million years. Since the galaxy is many billions of years old, he postulated, we should be practically surrounded by alien life or evidence thereof.

But we're not. So back to the question: "Where is everybody?"

The entire paradox depends on the assumption that earth and humanity are typical examples of planets and life anywhere else in the universe. This is usually referred to as the Theory of Mediocrity, that earth and its creatures are just average, universally. The problem is that Mediocrity is not a scientific conclusion but a presumption that is necessary for ETI searchers to do any work at all.

Many serious solutions have been offered as the paradox's resolution, but none really hold up.

But now I know!

Quite simply, the alien civilizations became so advanced that they fell victim to utterly incompetent self government. In other words, they fell into the deep, dark pit of socialism, and they fell into it one more time than they were able to get out.

And so the scene today on a typical alien planet:

Update: Five recent examples showing no matter where, no matter how, giving the Left political power is a comically stupid idea. The relevant part?

Typically, governments which fail catastrophically will invariably fold. The universal understanding that in order to maintain power a government will have to provide the necessary functions of a public sector — national security and law enforcement, infrastructure, basic health and education services, courts and the rule of law.

What we know in the 21st century is that the failure to provide adequately for those necessities, and particularly in concert with substituting other functions that are not necessities like wealth redistribution, regulating the intake of soda drinks, and micromanaging the use of real estate, is no longer sufficient to produce the removal of an incompetent government. What we know now is that rather than turn out a poisonous, overreaching gang of troglodytes in charge of a particular jurisdiction, the people contributing the tax base said troglodytes misappropriate from will simply decamp for better locales — and the rulers happily preside over the ruin that results, free of any particular threat of a middle-class revolt.

It’s this dynamic, playing out across the globe, that shows us civilizational decline in an advancing state.

Relatedly, technologically-advanced reality simulation has been proposed as an explanation for the lack of nearby aliens. First, this answer says that hyperdrives and FTL travel simply were never developed (and so may be impossible) and that the unimaginably vast distances of the galaxy make exploration simply too hard.

Then we have this: Virtual reality will completely transform children into zombies.

A girl tries virtual reality glasses at the Infosys's stand of the 2016 Hanover industrial trade fair in Hanover, Germany.

Warren Ferrell wrote,

While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation. He'll win at Madden football, but participate in no sport.

It makes sense that once a species develops the technology for space flight, it has also developed the technology for all manner of other things, including entertainment.

And that means - since we assume evolutionary processes are much the same everywhere else as here - that those species become addicted to virtual experiences more than real ones.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:

Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution. [Link]

So species that could explore space don't for no reason other than it simply isn't fun enough. More here.