A rather dark theoretical answer to the Fermi paradox

Which perhaps is why there was a Prime Directive in Star Trek to keep Kirk from propagating himself thought the universe with green and blue women.

More seriously, the actual "First in, last out" solution Berezin proposes is a grimmer scenario.

"What if the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?" he hypothesises.

As Berezin explains, this doesn't necessarily mean a highly developed extra-terrestrial civilisation would consciously wipe out other lifeforms – but perhaps "they simply won't notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it".

We are probably not the ants, but the future destroyers of the very worlds we've been looking for this whole time.

"Assuming the hypothesis above is correct, what does it mean for our future?" Berezin writes.

"The only explanation is the invocation of the anthropic principle. We are the first to arrive at the [interstellar] stage. And, most likely, will be the last to leave."

Again, such potential destruction wouldn't need to be wilfully designed or orchestrated – it could just play out like a completely unrestricted system, bigger than any individual's attempts to control it.

One example Berezin gives is free market capitalism, and another could be the dangers of an artificial intelligence (AI) untethered by constraints on its accumulation of power.

"One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that," Berezin writes.

"All that matters is that it can."

It's a pretty terrifying outlook on Fermi – basically, we may be the winners of a deadly race we didn't even know we were competing in, or as Andrew Masterson at Cosmos put it, "we are the paradox resolution made manifest".