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I would say it's the size of the universe and the fact that it is still expanding at an accelerated rate.
If the speed of light is really the "top speed" of the universe, it is inadequate for interstellar travel. It is barely good enough for timely communication, and not really even that.
Life can be as likely as it wants to be, but it seems to me that we're all quite divided, to the point of not being able to communicate at all with other potential intelligent species.
Isn't the fermi paradox specifically dealing with detection tho? Not just travel or communication.
I suppose I was focusing on detecting some sort of communications. It still matters that when we see objects at great distance in space, it's the objects in the distant past
This universe being unfriendly to interstellar and especially intergalactic travel would seriously hamper a galactic civilization, and thus be less likely for us to notice them.
There might be hundreds of civilizations out there, each having only expanded to a few dozen stars, not caring to go further. Even the makeup of the interstellar medium might be incredibly dangerous, basically necessitating generation ships to cross. Large scale expansion might simply be too hard.
That expansion at an accelerated rate - that's just so eerie when you think about it. The furthest objects we can see right now will slip away out of reach forever for the next generation, and so on. It's crazy to think that as time goes on, there will be less and less universe to observe.
That's something really interesting, though. When we look at distant objects, we aren't limited by the distance they're at right now. We're limited by the distance they were at when they emitted the light.
So the observable universe is still growing because the edge of that bubble is such a long time ago that everything was still much closer together.
But the light that reaches us is constantly getting stretched (red-shifted), so I'm not sure that our bubble is growing. Instead when they're stretched too thin, we won't be able to see it. I'm not 100% sure on the expansion rate of the universe and the pace of red shifting. Also, eventually all the galaxies are expected to be pushed so far away from each other due to the pressures exerted by Dark Energy, that soon we'll only be able to see just the stars of our Milky Way.
One of the weirdest facts. One that really makes you feel so small.