Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens.

Robin Hanson, who coined the term "Great Filter", presented a theory in 2021 to explain the Fermi Paradox. It's known as the "Grabby Aliens Theory". This 12 minute video does a good job of explaining the fairly non intuitive reasoning: [this video] As I understand it (it's not an easy theory to wrap your - or at least my - mind around), the reason we don't see any other civilizations is that we're among the first ones. This seems very unlikely, but is actually not. Because a successful hi tech civilization would likely be inclined to expand ("be grabby") and fill up the galaxy in ~100 million years, as Fermi pointed out. That would mean all habitable planets would then be taken, and no more civilizations would rise up from primordial goo like ours. That means - and it's a weird mental leap, but I think it's correct - that almost all civilizations arising "naturally" would have the same experience we have: The universe seems weirdly empty. I guess it also means that the galaxy is ours for the taking!

The the unseen ones are mostly the harmless ones. The grabby (basically the "expansionist Dyson sphere builders") are the ones we should be on the lookout for. [this video] [link] [link] Robin Hanson's model explains the data, answers the Fermi paradox. We don't see aliens because if there were aliens to be seen they would be in our place. (Because the hard-steps model parametrized by habitable zone time-frames limited by the lifecycle of stars gives a distribution of emergence of intelligent life. And if just a few of those start expanding, they'll soon cover enormous volumes, taking away the possibility for later emergence of intelligent life.)