In addition to the other helpful replies, one of the major flaws of the Fermi paradox is that it fails to account for the vastness of time. Our failure to observe spacefaring intelligent life is the metaphorical equivalent of a baby born at some point in human history somewhere on earth, opening it's eyes only long enough to blink, and not observing Cher. It doesn't mean that Cher doesn't exist, or even that Cher should be observable given that humanity is so large and old.

My argument of that is that we've only just started looking in a massive, massive, massive universe. Like, the other day. The big bang theory is less than a hundred years old and we only just discovered cosmic background radiation in 1964

We JUST started looking and we probably have no idea what we are looking for or at.

Also, these earth like planets are a fucking guess, a giant maybe. They make their host star, which we make assumptions of about their size, make a tiny hardly perceptible dip in light and we measure the wavelengts that were filtered out.

The more I learn about how this science is done, the more it all just looks like a big fucking maybe that someone spouts so confidently as fact. Like, the track record for fact is pretty thin in science.

I guess people tend to look to astronomers for information about space, while the Fermi paradox probably borders more on philosophy than on astronomy. And in a lot of people minds philosophers are not real scientists, unlike astronomers.