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Why "Fermi's Paradox" Isn't

Fermi's Paradox (or pseudo-paradox) is not a true paradox because the search space has not been sufficiently explored. According to Seth Shostak, author of the book Confessions of an Alien Hunter, and is a SETI Institute scientist and PR guy, S.E.T.I. has focused on 0.0000005 percent of our galaxy, which is akin to sampling a glass of water from Earth's oceans.  The Fermi hypothesis can be affected by so many 'what-if' factors regarding the detectability of the artifacts of extra-terrestrial civilizations.  There are so many un-answered questions about civilization longevity, the difficulty of space travel, the speed of propagation of civilizations (if any), the 'galactic zoo' hypothesis,  the possibility of galaxy-wide darwinism, Tipler's arguments, whether or not ET wants to communicate with us,  the insufficiency of our search methods (we've only examined a fraction of the galaxy for a very short period of time for purposeful signals directed at us; we currently could not detect detect 'leaked' signals, like TV or radio, from further than the nearest few stars, and even that is a challenge.)  And there is the question of whether or not ET uses similar technologies, and with the radio/TV spectrum looking more and more like noise because of the conversion to digital and spread spectrum transmission, it comes down to we will still only be looking for purposefully directed signals at us, with our level of technology. 

Quoting an old astronomy text "Even if 10,000 alien expeditions have visited the Earth at random times during the Earth's history, visits would have averaged hundreds of thousands of years apart.  Even the most recent expedition in such a scenario would therefore be unlikely to have left any readily recoverable historical or archaeological traces."

The (paraphrased) question of "Where are they, because they should be here already" isn't a paradox in the sense that it is a "true" statement, because we simply have'nt accumulated enough data to make Fermi's speculation a "true" statement or paradox, nor can we rule Fermi's hypothesis out; it just isn't a paradox (yet) because we haven't sufficiently examined the search space.

The so-called "Fermi's Paradox" asks the (para-phrased) question "Where are they?"  This page attempts to describe why it is not a "paradox" (in the sense of paradoxology) and that the Fermi-Hart paradox is really a speculation that has not been investigated sufficiently for it to become a true paradox.