The article provides one possible resolution to one Fermi paradox, but not another, and I think both a lot of literature and the comments here are pretty confused about the difference.
The possibly-resolved Fermi paradox: “Why do we see no life, when we’d expect to see tens of thousands of civilizations on average?” Assuming there really is no alien life, this paper answers that pretty convincingly: the distribution of civilizations is highly-skewed, such that the probability that only one civilization exists can be pretty large even if the average number of civilizations is still very high.
The unresolved Fermi paradox is “Why aren’t there any aliens?” This paper doesn’t answer that question (nor does it try to). It’s just pointing out that there’s a ton of possible reasons, so it’s not all that surprising that some combination of them might be very restrictive
The article provides one possible resolution to one Fermi paradox, but not another, and I think both a lot of literature and the comments here are pretty confused about the difference.
The possibly-resolved Fermi paradox: “Why do we see no life, when we’d expect to see tens of thousands of civilizations on average?” Assuming there really is no alien life, this paper answers that pretty convincingly: the distribution of civilizations is highly-skewed, such that the probability that only one civilization exists can be pretty large even if the average number of civilizations is still very high.
The unresolved Fermi paradox is “Why aren’t there any aliens?” This paper doesn’t answer that question (nor does it try to). It’s just pointing out that there’s a ton of possible reasons, so it’s not all that surprising that some combination of them might be very restrictive
.