> So we don’t even have equipment that could detect equivalent passive signals from our planet in the nearest other solar system. And our planet is increasingly not emitting loud broadband signals instead preferring fiber optics and point to point links for bandwidth and efficiency reasons (+ encryption).

Sure. Which is why no one particularly expects broadband radio signals to be the first indication we find of other intelligent life out there. Narrowband signals, particularly pulsed ones, are one of the (relatively) more likely indicators, but these are still very much a "We are doing radio astronomy already and the same sort of weirdness we would expect from intelligent life is already the sort of weirdness we're looking for for a variety of other reasons, so doing a bit more to differentiate between that and other phenomena is cheap. Pulsars are a good example here - pulsars are cool and we get excited when we find new ones, but they're the sort of oddity that could be quite similar to what we would see from intelligent life.

Radio gets a lot of discussion here for a couple of reasons - the first being that we can just look at a whole lot of it, for the previously mentioned reasons, but also because it plays a bit into the whole human tendency to get excited about things that make them a little afraid. WE'VE been broadcasting out to the universe so people imagine a bit what might happen if someone out there is listening. There's the whole Dark Forest hypothesis, so maybe we've signed our own death warrant by leaking these radio waves! Probably not, but it can be entertaining to talk about, so people do.

But in general, most scientists really only expect to learn of intelligent life via radio transmissions if someone is specifically attempting to talk to us, regardless of whether or not life is ubiquitous in the galaxy or universe at large.

> I have yet to find anyone who believes that the Fermi paradox is real who bothers to offer a justification that doesn’t rely on assumptions about FTL or completely ignore the practical challenges of we’re not even seriously looking and don’t really know what to look for let alone the serious practical challenges that interstellar travel could be a huge barrier since we don’t even have a counter that such travel is indeed possible (eg even our furthest probe which required a confluence of orbital mechanics to make that speed possible in the first place would need to travel ~500x longer just to reach the nearest solar system).

Again, "believers" in the fermi paradox (this is still a REALLY WEIRD way to frame the discussion! people don't talk about it in this manner!) don't have some firm belief that there aren't aliens out there. They might suspect that we could be the only intelligent species in the galaxy but I've never seen or read of any scientist that talks about this subject going "nope no way intelligent life exists in our neighborhood we would 100% have seen it if it did!" - and this is a subject I find interesting so I've read a lot of writing and listened to a lot of talks on this subject.

But no one is ignoring the possibility of FTL or the idea that we might have no idea what to actually look for. Hell, maybe there's just no reason to expand to any significant portion of the galaxy - perhaps most civilizations focus on becoming hyper efficient in their resource utilization and only expand as absolutely necessary, or download their consciousnesses into a simulation, or whatever. But human nature has been to expand to everywhere we can, and humans are the only "advanced" intelligence we can go off of - so colonizing the galaxy seems like a reasonable thing to assume other species might do, based on our own experiences. And you don't need FTL or even travel that goes at a significant fraction of the speed of light to have colonized much of the galaxy on the timeframes we're talking. The Milky Way is 13.6 billion years old and we know of planets that formed quite early in the Milky Way's history. Now, we think that it would have been tough for anywhere in the galaxy to have been particularly habitable until 6 billion years ago or so, but Earth is about 4.5b years old - there's a whole lot of planets that would have had a 1.5b year head start to get to where we are now. 1.5 billion! Even at 1% the speed of light and not using anything like von neumann probes that's a lot of time to do a whole lot of colonizing. And we're pretty sure that our current understanding of technology could let us build something that reaches 8-10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion. Give us a hundred thousand years, much less a million, and we've not even scratched the surface of our time budget and we'd almost certainly have technology that would let us go even faster.