Are you arguing with the article's worth or that of the paradox which many of the world's top physicists have wrestled with for over 50 years?
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I don't believe that Fermi was arguing against the existence of other life, or intelligent life. He was saying, like any good proponent of the scientific method, that he didn't understand it, given the notions laid out in the paradox. This was what Einstein would have called a “gedanken experiment” or “thought experiment.” When you can't measure something directly because of lack of instruments you have to lay out reasonable models in your head (or across a lunch table) and then try to deduce what it was you couldn't see.
Are they not there? Problem with that is that it assumes that we're it, or we're the first (what are the odds of that?)
Are they there but we can't detect them? I think this is the most likely, but what's wrong with that premise? He argues that odds are better than not that if they are there then we should see evidence that we can detect. So what are we missing?
The author lays out those arguments like a dead fish on the table but then locks himself in to the MUST NOT BE SINCE WE CAN'T SEE THEM ALREADY (absence of evidence IS evidence of absence) side of the equation, without asking the "what are we missing" part of the “gedanken experiment.”
Bad science. Fermi was not a bad scientist. He would not have said that they were there (on faith) if he hadn't found evidence. He wanted evidence, one way or the other.