The laws of probability suggest humanity is doomed, at least in our current form. We as human ponderers are roughly a sampling of the average human pondering their existence. About 60 billion humans have come before us, which suggests roughly just 60 billion will come after us since we are most likely to be in the middle of the pack rather than near the beginning or the end of the pack. (Roughly the Copernican principle as applied to human population density and time.)

If most of our future is to be Borg-like, then we'd more likely be Borgs contemplating our existence, not humans. But us (here now) being at such a coincidental position would be violating the Copernican principle. Either way, we are either doomed to end soon or become Borg-like, neither is a pleasant thought.

Of course coincidences do happen and we may indeed coincidentally be at the start of the human expansion curve; but if I were in Vegas, I wouldn't bet on it. We're doomed, guys.

It's far cheaper to the beat the holy sh8t out of somebody rather than create these disease and aging simulators.

Indeed. Fear and paranoia are often the main ingredients to colossal disasters.

USA's post-9/11 fears drove us to invade Iraq for no decent reason whatsoever, and create a power-vacuum that haunts us and the Middle East to this day. Saddam may have been a jerk, but he served to stabilize other jerks (Iran gov't, ISIS, etc.). We upset the Balance of Jerks (we lost Jerk Jenga).

"Let's throw Terminators at the problem. What can possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong..."

I also subscribe to the "great filter" theory. About 25 years after the radio was invented, we were busy gassing each other in trenches, followed closely by a global pandemic, then mass genocide, then teetering on the edge of nuclear war. That's not a very wide window for aliens to notice our presence, if they rely on artificial radio waves to detect intelligent life.

My take is that technological improvements make radio sound like noise after a few decades. Early radios systems are very simple things which have signals (CW, AM, FM, ...) that are very distinct from electrical and thermal noise. Their signals were both drastically different from, and drastically stronger than, the background, enabling simple detectors to separate a signal's information from all that chaff.

Modern radios (such as spread spectrum systems, especially OFDM) squeeze nearly the Shannon Limit out of precious bandwidth (and also be frugal with transmit power) by using nearly all of it to carry information. This makes them virtually indistinguishable from a celestial object with a little extra heat (buried among things like stars, which have a LOT of heat).

It was only about 120 years from when Hertz and Tesla started making easily detectable radio waves to the Analog Television Shutdown, a significant milepost in the decommissioning of easily detectable radio signatures. I expect that, within anther few decades, the Earth will be emitting very little that might be recognizable as a radio signature of intelligent life, unless we expend a bunch of energy sending such a signature deliberately.

So my solution to the mystery expressed in the Drake Equation is that L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) is short, not due to the falls of civilizations, but to economic incentives to use the aether only in ways that are no longer noticeable at a distance.