Grabby Aliens? Unusual Explanation of Fermi Paradox and Why We Don't Hear Anyone

Apparently there is hardly enough phosphorus out there to support life as we know it, let alone life Elsewhere.

"Grabby Aliens" theory is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out.

Unless the speed limit of the speed of light can be surpassed there will be no interstellar travel.

I for one welcome our ant overlords

Alien Ants.

All life on Earth tend to colonize. Look at rabbits and frogs in Australia and Hippos in Colombia. The reproduce as fast as possible when entering a new environment. They slow down once they reach some sort of local limit.

The important point is that the speed of light limits the usefulness of any expansion. Given the cost of expansion, no civilization would expand beyond what can be traversed in half an alien lifetime, as they would never get any benefit. If aliens are immortal or the speed of light can be exceeded, then all bets are off.

Propositions: 1) We have not "seen" evidence of aliens because they utilize methods we are "blind" to -- e.g., communication systems that transcend sensory (sound/light) detection such as telepathy and remote viewing or quantum tech beyond our current comprehension. 2) They employ defensive technologies that "cloak" them from detection by "grabby" civilizations (including barbaric humans pursuing aggressive exploitation of other civilizations' natural resources). Given the age of the universe, it seems (typically) narcissistic of humans to assume that we are the ones who are advanced. It makes more sense to me that highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are functioning with methods, or at frequencies, beyond our current capacity to detect. Better to assume that we are raw students rather than wise masters.

I personally favor the idea of resource collapse. Climbing the technology ladder, at least from our example and I can't imagine another, requires consuming of specific resources (hydrocarbons, easily recoverable metals) far, far faster than the planet would have created. At that point it's a race against time to achieve breakout and to transition to some sort of sustainable sources of energy and raw materials. If they/we don't achieve that breakout before running out of the resources needed for a technologically civilization to exist, that civilization collapses... and then it's stuck. Metals in easily recoverable form replenish very slowly (millions of years). Hydrocarbons similarly replenish very slowly and will be consumed at that trickle rate. The species never gets a second chance to re-climb the technological ladder, and eventually either disappears (meaning their world goes fallow for many millions of years) or maintains at a low, sustainable equivalent to agrarian society or hunter-gatherer societies. Either way, you don't see them any more. I think this is likely the final Great Filter: outracing resource exhaustion.

I just finished analyzing 20,000 exposures of the entire Andromeda Galaxy, using a prism to search for laser communication from it. I found none.