I have no background to support my thoughts other than an interest in space and science. If humans survive long enough I expect it will happen, but I agree with your sentiment. I think the timespan will be so vast as to make it meaningless to speculate about it now. How long before we could communicate and travel to the nearest star? We should definitely still try though! My issue with the Fermi paradox is the assumption is that 1% of "life" on a planet becomes intelligent and similarly that 1% of those develop the necessary tech. I think those figure is way, way, waaaaaaaay too high. As an analogy - how many types of living creatures on earth have developed tech to communicate beyond earth? Is it 0.01%? Still like I say it's just my own thoughts without any scientific research to back it up. I'm personally a bit of a doubter that life will ever be found elsewhere,
I think we’re at a pretty similar spot here, I really do think there’s other life out there- just that it seems so unlikely we’ll find it it’s effectively not there at all, at least in a human timescale. Which is why finding it at close as Mars would be pretty devastating in my mind. Of course, finding microbes or something wouldn’t have to mean imminent death, I would just be much more nervous. I think most calculations there are at least a couple of orders of magnitude off. Doing some rough napkin math, over the course of the 3.5 billion years we’ve had 1 (2 if you’d want to include Neanderthals maybe) gain enough intelligence for my arbitrary definition to include them as “intelligent”. One could maybe argue some of the smarter animals should be included but I don’t think it’s going to affect the math much. If a species is a “type” of life form, then there’s 8.7M now, or about 8.7B ever if the internet isn’t lying to me. Sticking with the million to be safe, we’re at about 2/8.7M or 2.229e5% every 3.5B years if I’m doing that right. Then we’re the only example of intelligent life we know of to even dabble in space exploration and communication, so I’m not sure how to estimate that part - on one hand it’s hard for me to imagine intelligent life not staring at the stars and reaching out for them, on the other hand I’m stuck in my human existence and probably wouldn’t understand what a different intelligent life form’s existence is like if I had one sitting in front of me explaining. It might be unlikely even at cosmic scales, or it might be near 100%