@ Eraser
I agree that resource depletion and global warming may not completely eradicate humans. But the disruptions they cause WILL cause a collapse of modern society and a new, non technological dark age. And having used up all the easy to gather resources such as fossil fuels, easy to mine metals, etc. recovering from that will be almost impossible. Unless we use the remaining resources to create a completely sustainable society, there will be shortages and eventual collapse. Given what I've observed of humans so far, that seems extremely unlikely.

Ask yourself, would you fly towards naked monkeys who barely can get to space if you had the technology to fly here?

I think we would. There's a difference between sending a probe and going yourself, the latter being preferable. Humans travel to Antarctica to study bacteria, and to the bottom of the ocean to study the worms and life around thermal vents, I imagine any sufficiently advanced curious alien life would prefer to come themselves. The complexity of humans would be a huge draw, as I think many planets develop life, but very few develop intelligent, technologically advanced life. I do agree that any species advanced enough to travel the stars would also have some version of the prime directive in place to avoid disrupting them.

As for going ourselves, we wouldn't need to evolve into a new species either. Artificial gravity is a pretty easy problem to solve. It's the FTL part that's challenging.

I agree that von Neumann probes are an outdated idea, remote observation is a much better and cheaper way to assess systems. However, I don't think the Fermi Paradox is outdated:

1. Any developing civilization will go through it's radio wave phase, and that should be detectable. However, that's probably a pretty short window of a few 100 years before some new technology takes its place. Easy to miss if we weren't listening at the right time. You could go millions of years without hearing a signal. Also, it would be easily detectable by nearby stars, but once it gets out a bit, the signal would be so weak as to be nearly imperceptible.

2. Life may be plentiful, but intelligent, civilized life that advances to the point of building interstellar travel is probably very, very rare. It took life on earth a couple of billion years to get to this point, and it wasn't a forgone conclusion.

3. There may be no way to travel FTL. In such a case, it would be very difficult for any civilization to travel here. The width of our own galaxy is 100,000 light years. The time it would take to travel to other stars at sublight speeds is decades. You need huge self-sustaining ships for that, and the closest stars would take years to reach, further stars decades or millenia.