"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."
