My problem with that thinking is that we have 1 confirmed planet with life out of 8/9. That's hardly a sufficient sample size.
It's like asking 9 friends who they're voting for, and 8 of them say Jeb Bush, and then taking that information and assuming that Jeb will have a landslide victory against Hillary Clinton. A good sample size tells us that it's clearly not the case.
The universe has been around for over 13 billion years.
If there's aliens, I'd think they'd have found us first.
We don't really know the scope of how far humanity is going to get with our technological advancements. Right now, we're stumped with the problem of getting to places so distant in any reasonable amount of time. And this is a problem that, hypothetically, every other race would have to cope with in the universe.
So in regards to that issue, distance, it could be an inevitability that any civilization just has to deal with the fact that it can't traverse that barrier. It's just too difficult. Now, we don't
know if humanity will be able to figure out how to warp space-time and use wormholes to get from A to B easily, but let's assume for now we can't. Well, then, it's likely nobody else can. There's your solution; there's an abundance of life, but we're impossibly far from each other, and therefore incapable of communicating.
Alternatively, intelligent life could be so rare, that it only pops up once or twice in a given galaxy. That, by itself, makes it practically impossible for us to imagine being able to locate any habitable system just given the sheer number of them. There are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
100 billion, and
most have many planets. That's an incomprehensibly huge amount of celestial bodies to visit, and impractical for even a
really intelligent space-faring people to look at.
If that's not a satisfactory excuse, then let's just pretend there's only one intelligent race per galaxy. Then we're in an entirely different scale of distance. The magnitude of change is
enormous when comparing distances inside of a galaxy with the distances of one relative to another. That's just another level of difficulty that would have to be conquered, and it might not be able to be. You really do have to gain a sense of appreciation for the
size of all this stuff. The universe is fucking
huge. It's another possibility that these hypothetical space civilizations all just die out before they can get anywhere substantial. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. That's a
lot of time for something to find us. It's
also a lot of time for things to come into existence, and die out. Humanity has been around for such a ridiculously small sliver of time, but if we project where we might be in the next thousand or so years in regards to space travel, that's
still negligible in the grand scale of how long things have been around. Civilizations could rise and fall in the blink of an eye relative to the history of the cosmos, and we just
missed one that we could talk to. Maybe that's the natural way things happen; civilizations come and go all over the place, and never advance far enough to see each other.
Or intelligent life just isn't common enough for it to be feasible that they detect each other. Of all the innumerable species on Earth, and throughout it's history, how many have become intelligent? One. We could just live in a universe teeming with life, but it's just relatively dumb plants and animals that aren't gonna go anywhere.
Now you can mix and match all of these issues, play around with the degree of their impact on interstellar/galactic colonization, and get tons of different possibilities for why, in the "vast" expanse of time
we've been around, nothing has come to say, "Hello." To clarify, if I didn't make it obvious enough earlier. I don't believe in aliens. I don't, "Believe" in anything. I certainly think it's
likely that they're out there, given our current knowledge of the Solar System and evolution, but I don't know anything conclusive at all. So I'm not saying all of this to argue that aliens definitely have to exist; I'm just saying that the Fermi Paradox has counterarguments, and I think they're pretty compelling sometimes.
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