Nature doesn’t have a “plan.” We humans exist by the most slender of chances, the smallest deviation in any prior event being sufficient to preclude our existence. We are the only technological species to have existed on Earth in nearly four billion years of life. We likely will be gone in a blink of an eye.

So, although life is probably widespread throughout the galaxy (and, by extension, the universe) it is probable that tool-making life is quite rare. Remember, any aliens visiting Earth even a mere million years ago would have left empty-handed. And a million years is the blink of an eye in a 4.5 billion-year history, being 0.02% of elapsed time since planet formation.

Given the short duration of most species, the possibility of any overlap between our technological civilization and an alien technological civilization within reasonable distance (maybe 60 to 100 light years) is vanishingly small.

The so-called Fermi Paradox is really not a paradox at all but simply a failure to understand all the important variables.