"Planetary scientists suggest a solution to the Fermi paradox: Superlinear scaling leading to a singularity".
Direct link to academic paper: "Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?", by Wong and Bartlett, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0029.
"Figure 3. Perhaps
hypothetical Type III civilizations are in an inaccessible region of
biotechnological–population size state space, where civilization
trajectories are bounded by a ‘burnout horizon’, and long-lived
civilizations have consciously reoriented their trajectories away from
growth in population size and length scales to explore other dimensions
of biotechnological state space. Note that we do not rule out the
possibility of some kind of channel that might allow a transition to the
Type III region."