Thinking about the option of other Life is and more importantly more intellegent life is great for spending hours of thought on . I couldnt help but hear you mix in a lot of your personal wishfulness to the equation that is no bad thing at all but if you want to get a decent guess of our current predicament we have to look at the glass of water half full aswell as half empty and not just one . You hardly couldnt account for any main issues and side issues that where tackled alone by the Fermi paradox let alone tons of material observation and new discoveries added to the schmix we have today . All i can say is that the chance for finding more life is high and the possibility for it to exist in our solar system beside us at a microscopic scale is even there . the chance for finding intellegent life such as us is way lower because intellegence isnt a necessity in evolution of life . by the amount of stars and roughly thrice the amount of planets their places and the spaces they occupy the amount of time that passed the possible necessities for life like phosphor in the earth the immense distance between everything and natural and self inflicting extinction events that on a broughter scale will arise more frequently and even that just accounts for a fraction of the factors that could be important to predict life the guess is as good as anyones that there is or was with certainty mathmatically speaking another civilication . the issues that arrise with us being unable to find structures of more intellegent life finding any hints of them even so we should creates problems but not unsolvable ones . and at the end of the day if we can make it as a kardashelv 2 civ we are easly capable of finding out directly on ourselfs . I Recommend the Isaac arthur channel for Sci fi scenarios in any way this one included if you the reader of this too long comment is interested .