I apologise in advance if this post doesn’t contain much science. As we’ve seen astronomy is mostly based around an astounding amount of ingenuity and bloody-mindedness backed up by not a small quantity of guesswork, but when it comes to dealing with questions like the Fermi Paradox we don’t even have enough information to make an educated guess. As a result things can start to get a little metaphysical, almost bordering on sci-fi at times.
Here’s an interesting fact: if you smooshed together everything in the Solar System that was not a star — all the planets, moons, asteroids and other assorted junk out there — you would end up with a ball of stuff with just one seven-hundredth the mass of the Sun. The Sun has 99.86% of the overall mass of the Solar System.
Here’s another interesting fact: if you took a pea and put it next to a basketball, you would achieve roughly the same visual effect as if you took the largest planet, Jupiter, and put it next to the Sun.