The Paradox:

1. The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars, and billions of them are similar to the sun.
2. It is highly likely that some of these stars will have planets that are similar to Earth.
3. If we assume – via the Copernican principle – that Earth is not particularly special, then intelligent life should also exist on some fraction of these Earth-like planets.
4. Some of these intelligent life-forms might develop advanced technology, and even interstellar travel.
5. Interstellar travel would take a long time, but as there are many sun-like stars that are billions of years older, there has been plenty of time for such travel to have occurred.
6. Given all this, why haven’t we met or seen any trace of aliens? Where is everybody?

Resolution:

# It is not so easy to evolve to high-consciousness 21st Century humans.

# The entire universe focused over the eons to get Planet Earth
(and its humans) to this point.

# The odds of reaching this point are radically longer than
mainstream science assesses.