Fermi's Paradox and the End of the Universe

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Like most science fivtion writers, I've spent a bit of time thinking about the Fermi Paradox, the question of, if the galaxy is full of planets that could be habitable for life, and is tens of billions of years old, why aren't they here already? And, possibly less common for science fiction writers, I'd spent some time thinking about atomic spin-spin coupling in a solid-state matrix as a way to implement a quantum computer, since spins are conveniently quantized and can be easily put into superposition states by just rotating the measurement direction. Of course, any such computer would be quickly decorrelated at room temperature, but you could assume that sufficiently robust quantum error-correction software could somehow magically deal with that. One solution to the Fermi paradox, of course, is to ask, "how do we know that they're NOT already here?" If they were, would we know it? Or, would we not even know what to look for?

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