“So if I don’t get more than four replies, I’ll be really surprised.”
Yeah.... I don’t think you’re going to have to ask the question “Where are they?”
BTW, I just don’t believe it is practical to travel more than a light year or two at best, and that there is no intelligent life within several hundred light years at best. So Fermi’s Paradox never bothered me.
“BTW, I just don’t believe it is practical to travel more than a light year or two at best,...”
Why?
Seems to me that to make interstellar travel & communications practical, you have to have harnessed space/time to your advantage, giving you relatively unlimited range. This may be why we never hear from others - they are transmitting at something beyond light speed while we are listening at light speed & below.
I agree with you. It's amazing the way Star Trek, more than any other space epic, took pure fantasy and created the illusion in the mind of several generations that it represented some kind of scientific extrapolation.