Well-timed synchronicity is a wonderful thing. I was the beneficiary of this phenomenon last week, when scarcely twenty‑eight years after reading Geoffrey Landis’ "The Fermi Paradox: An Approach Based on Percolation Theory," a Lindsay Nikole video essay on an unrelated matter suggested an interesting embellishment.

The Fermi Paradox isn’t really a paradox so much as a question: calculations suggest even modest propulsion could spread a species across the galaxy in a geological instant, yet we see no evidence. Enrico Fermi’s question "But where is everybody?" remains unanswered.

Landis attributes the silence to the difficulty and cost of interstellar colonization, the need for child civilizations to be self‑sufficient, and the low probability that colonies will become colonizers, leading to a patchy network of settled systems.

Nikole’s video about cheetahs shows how bottlenecks reduced genetic diversity, making the species vulnerable. Applying Landis’ logic, each colony is a genetic bottleneck; preserving only 90% of diversity yields a chain of ever‑more related populations, risking universal vulnerability.

If percolation probability is below a critical threshold, colonization terminates after a finite number of colonies. Thus, we see no evidence of radio‑based interstellar communication, just as we observe.