The "about to end" phrase is doing a lot of work there, unless you mean particularly 'soon on a geological time scale'.
Of course we could be a few hours from some autocratic idiot starting the last nuclear war, a few months from a terminal AI singularity, or a few years from a runaway climate or food web collapse. But, I see nothing in the Fermi Paradox requiring the end to be so soon. Even dozens of millenia is still the blink of an eye in geological or galactic time scales. Perhaps the filter is populating the solar system but not escaping to other star systems before the sun expands into a red giant?
Of course we could be a few hours from some autocratic idiot starting the last nuclear war, a few months from a terminal AI singularity, or a few years from a runaway climate or food web collapse. But, I see nothing in the Fermi Paradox requiring the end to be so soon. Even dozens of millenia is still the blink of an eye in geological or galactic time scales. Perhaps the filter is populating the solar system but not escaping to other star systems before the sun expands into a red giant?