My solution to fermi paradox and probably the most correct solution...

We are just 2% different genetically from monkeys, we are no more than 6% different from any other mammal and no more than 20% different from ANY multicellular life on earth.

Monkeys our closest kin, communicate over long distances by howls and shrieks. We NEVER holler back. Monkeys can do nearly everything we can do and we know exactly how to make all the tech that any monkey could possibly conceive of. A monkey howling into the sky looking for other intelligent life would rightfully conclude there is no other intelligent life.

With just 2% difference between them and us, we barely recognize a monkey as anything more than a curiosity or lab animal. We most certainly don't find it worth our time to spend a great deal of time and energy attempting to communicate with them at their level.

I find it the height of hubris for us to listen to the sky, find no monkeys howling back in the EM spectrum in a way we are capable of predicting and deciphering, and concluding that somehow this is evidence that there is no intelligent life, or that we are somehow the most intelligent life out there.

What we are really looking for right now are are other monkey tribes howling into the EM spectrum during a time in their civilization that communicating this way made any sense at all. Yet even now, we are switching from communicating by modulating EM fields to communication by modulating coherent photons.

Consider even a high end pocket calculator made up until about 30 years ago...

I have a feeling that within 100 years we'll look back at electronics in general in the same way we do steampunk style "calculating mechanical devices".

Or the height in communications tech from when I was my kids age...

We don't even look this advanced to other civilizations yet.

They look at us and they just hear yet another breed of monkey, howling in the forest.