The universe was very hot in the beginning. It took a while for stars to form. Even longer for planets to form. Even longer for planets to cool down. The early universe was a violent place. Full of destruction. After the protoplanetary disk finally coalesces to planets and when planets finally stopped getting bombarded by meteorites, they could start cooling. In the earlier days of the universe there might have been intelligent life supporting planets wiped out by the chaos of the early universe. We might not be the first. But we might be one of the first. We might be early. The universe might have a bright future ahead of itself in terms of intelligent life. This is all speculation of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firstborn_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk

Now you could still say that surely there have been enough time for some advanced civilizations to form. And I would argue that we don't know that. At least we have not detected them, either due our instruments or unwillingness of the intelligent life to communicate to us.

There are of course many other explanations of the Fermi Paradox. But since its all unknown, its basically pick and choose. I choose to pick the nice option. There are however other nice options :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...

Maybe we aren't the first living things to exist in the universe, but the first intelligent ones, and intelligent here meaning creatures with ability to ask these questions and make space probes to explore the universe.

Maybe intelligence isn't always a product of evolution. Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.

A lengthy tangentially related post on my blog if you care -

https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...

The more entertaining answer from a scifi book. Aliens that developed earlier decided to become isolationist and wanted to stop young civilizations from blasting radio waves at them, so once a civilization became semi-industrialized, they chucked a planet killing rock at them.

I think that’s the question, is 13.8 billion years a lot of time, of not a lot of time?

Earth (and the solar system) is 4.3B years old, a bit more than a third of that, so it's not really that much time in comparison no?

If you assume the heat death as the end point, we're ridiculously early in the universe's lifespan.

Quite unlikely, but if there is a multiverse, everything is possible.