For over a billion years Earth has been broadcasting a very powerful signal screaming "likely biosphere here" in the form of its albedo spectrum. It's a wet, warm planet that for almost two billion years has had a heavily oxidizing atmosphere. There are few natural explanations for that that don't involve life, since it strongly implies that something is doing work to maintain an energy differential.
If there are "reaper" aliens around in any form, it would be logical for them to start firing relativistic kinetic weapons at any candidate biosphere immediately. Why wait for intelligence to even get a foothold? Just whack any potential competitor while it's nothing but goop and creepy crawlies.
So if there are ancient powerful hostile or "grabby" aliens around, we should not be here.
It's a pretty powerful argument for one of:
(1) We are very early.
(2) Intelligent complex life is extremely rare, occurring less often than e.g. once per galaxy per ten billion years. (A bit different from being very early since it implies we might never find another even after billions of years.)
(3) Something weird is going on, e.g. our solar system is being kept as a wildlife preserve and/or there is a "prime directive" or something.
(4) Something even weirder is going on, which explodes into a long tail of possibilities. Maybe we are wrong about our basic cosmology. Maybe continued advancement in intelligence leads places very different from space flight such as traversing dimensions or converting oneself into some more exotic form invisible to us (like the "ascension" trope in sci-fi). ... and so on.
What is the bias here? Who is biased, the "reaper" aliens? The commenter you are responding to? Can you expand your comment a bit?
> We only started sending out low entropy information out into outer space in the past 120 years or so
Humans yes. But our planet looks unmistakably like it can have life. That is the signal.
It reminds me of people who hate the idea that a omnipotent being created us, but are fascinated by the idea a hyperintelligent being simulated us
Also, if you want to discuss what God is or wants of us, pick a God and we can discuss, based on holy books and revelations, what His/Her/its intentions may be. Just saying "God" doesn't mean anything at all - there is little similarity to be found for example between YHWH, Brahman, and Amaterasu that could see a meaningful discussion.
In particular, speculating about what God may want (even if you believe one exists) is entirely futile, as it could want anything at all. In contrast, there are constraints on what an alien species could possibly be like - for example, we know with essentially absolute certainty that an alien species wouldn't eat quarks, whereas there is no reason to say that God wouldn't consume quarks.
Now of course, depending on your particular religion, you may have some things that you believe God told you explicitly. In no major religion though is God just lonely.
For example, in Christianity God created us and He only wants us to follow His laws; the notion that we could evolve to become akin to God is heretical - God is only one, and He demands worship and love, not emulation. For another example, in some versions of Hinduism, God (Brahman) encompasses everything, and we are already God - we can grow to understand this thing, but the very notion of a second God is entirely nonsensical, as God is already literally everything.
From the Book of Abraham (an LDS scriptural text):
21 I dwell in the midst of them all; I now, therefore, have come down unto thee to declare unto thee the works which my hands have made, wherein my wisdom excelleth them all, for I rule in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, in all wisdom and prudence, over all the intelligences thine eyes have seen from the beginning; I came down in the beginning in the midst of all the intelligences thou hast seen.
22 Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones;
23 And God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born.
24 And there stood aone among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
25 And we will aprove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;
26 And they who akeep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have dglory added upon their heads for ever and ever.
The founder of the religion spoke at a funeral and had this to say:
The mind of man is as immortal as God himself. I know that my testimony is true; hence, when I talk to these mourners, what have they lost? Their friends and relatives are separated from their bodies for only a short season; their spirits existed coequal with God, and they now exist in a place where they converse together, the same as we do on the earth. Is it logic to say that a spirit is immortal and yet has a beginning? Because if a spirit has a beginning, it will have an end.
That is good logic. I want to reason further on the spirit of man, for I am dwelling on the spirit and body of man--on the subject of the dead. I take my ring from my finger and liken it unto the mind of man, the immortal spirit, because it has no beginning. Suppose I cut it in two; as the Lord lives, because it has a beginning, it would have an end.
All the fools and learned and wise men from the beginning of creation who say that man had a beginning prove that he must have an end. If that were so, the doctrine of annihilation would be true. But if I am right, I might with boldness proclaim from the house tops that God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all. God himself could not create himself. Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle; it is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it. Moreover, all the spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible to enlargement.
The first principles of man are self-existent with God. God found himself in the midst of spirits and glory, and because he was greater, he saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have the privilege of advancing like himself--that they might have one glory upon another and all the knowledge, power, and glory necessary to save the world of spirits.
Is that accurate? Clarke's third law and all that. Any discussion on what alien beings, or for that matter, some sort of hyper-advanced AI intelligence, ends up unbounded by the limitations of current human knowledge. People ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to such hypothetical entities all of the time, but also anthropocentric motivations.
See Roko's Basilisk which presupposes a future superintelligent A.I. is able to project back into history with perfect clarity, create simulations of sentient beings, and is petty enough to exact vengeance upon them. So you end up arguing about secular deities.
These discussions are fun yet wrapped up in non-falsifiability and woo.
It is - we would have to be so wrong about how the universe works for that to be possible that it would be absolutely miraculous that we can even make a fire, not to mention a particle accelerator.
People tend to significantly underestimate how little room there is for us to be significantly wrong about such things and still have all the observations we've made. There are still major gaps in our understanding of the universe, to be sure, but they are nowhere near the level of allowing for beings which strip quarks from a nucleus.
I think a more practical take on this isn't life is rare it's that both space and time are big. Two civilizations existing simultaneously but 1/100th a galaxy apart are still a thousand light years apart. Each would see the other's home system as one of billions of observation candidates.
Even with massive SETI operations by both civilizations the odds of those two civilizations discovering one another are pretty small. Even if we posit advanced civilizations are more abundant, separated by only a few hundred light years, the odds are still very small any two civilizations will find each other.
Detecting "leaked" radio emissions just isn't a thing that can happen. The inverse square law make this plain. If we placed our most sensitive radio telescopes on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system we wouldn't be able to detect Earth's radio emissions save for rare blips where a powerful radar system's beam happened to point directly at Alpha Centauri. Earth would need a system of persistent ASETI transmitters aimed at specific stars to have a chance to have emissions be detected by civilizations there.
There don't need to really posit anything weirder than space is fucking huge to explain the Fermi paradox.
[1] I do not think that the simplifications are problematic, as long as one is aware of them. It is rather the opposite: Running a simulation with a simplified model helps us to observe some basic principles at work. Later we might refine and enrich our models and simulations. To use an analogy: If we want to study the movement of objects under the influence of the Earth's gravity, we should start with cannonballs and not with feathers.