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.