system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Trek] How does Star Trek explain the Fermi Paradox?

For those who don't know, the Fermi Paradox is the question of why, in a world with trillions of planets, no other life has been detected. There's various explanations- most life hides, most life dies out, most life is on worlds unsuited to technology, so forth so forth. The issue is, though, in Star Trek, none of these are true.

The absolutely *are* major galactic civilizations flying around everywhere, colonizing planets, sending out signals, and not infrequently outright coming to earth and wandering around. It's thee best case scenario for determining the existence of alien life.

But from what we can tell, before first contact, humans didn't know about aliens.  How did no evidence of multiple galactic powers show up?

On our world, the question is "where are all the aliens?". In star trek, the question is "how did we not notice all these aliens?". So why was there a Fermi Paradox in star trek?
gpt
The answer lies in the Prime Directive. While officially a Starfleet law, even factions not aligned with the Federation seem to have agreed that interfering in any way with pre-warp civilizations is highly unethical at the very least, if not outright evil. While there are a number of cases where this rule has been violated by Starfleet officers, it can be assumed that the rule is held to well enough by most of the spacefaring factions that we on Earth remained blissfully ignorant until the invention of the warp engine, when the Vulcans revealed themselves to us.