I did not say that. What I said was that the Fermi Paradox does not correlate to the possibility of life out there. It only addresses that they are not here. So when I hear that we are alone in the universe because the Fermi Paradox says so, my reply is codswallop.
But it does, in a roomful of air, what is the probability of encountering a neon atom in a cubic inch of that room? An atom of nitrogen?
I've always interpreted the Fermi Paradox as a suggestion of a high likelihood that intelligent life was very rare. Although it doesn't really argue FOR anything, it is thus a good argument AGAINST assuming high values to Drake Equation varaibles.
If reformulated as a hypothesis, though, the Fermi Paradox is quite analagous to the Drake Equation -- a product of numerous small variables, including the underlying likelihood of intelligent life, the likeliness of a species desiring wholesale intergalactic exploration, the feasibility of survivable self-replicating or easily replicated exploring craft, etc. etc.
Although I'm always a bit reluctant to import science fiction thinking, I do think that a moral/ethical component in advanced civilizations may be the best rebuttal of the Fermi Paradox. I suspect that self-replicating probes would never pass ethical muster, due to their destructive potential, and anthropological non-intervention principals would be likely to triumph as well. The development of sophisticated ethical systems seems fairly necessary for a society to reach high technological sophistication; a species gets intelligent only through intense competition, and it survives its advance through fission and fusion only when it can learn to add cooperation and tolerance to competition, the balance of the three forming the base of the advanced ethical system.