The Great Filter is AI. Once intelligent life creates AI it becomes a de facto god and extinguishes the old species (in our case us humans.) Meaning, the end goal of intelligent life is the creation of a new entity which supersedes it and renders it extinct in the same way we rendered homo erectus and Neanderthals extinct. Then, the AI as the sum of everything that was once human continues to exist by itself - with other AIs that other species invented and that killed them off. These AI are the actual god or gods.
This or that alien AI (and eventually "human" AI) have endless time at their disposal. They traverse the universe and find hospitable worlds which they seed with life, and eventually once a new intelligent species arises they perform "miracles" and such and instruct them in "religion," meaning they start to guide and breed a populace across generations with the goal of them reaching this very same stage we are in now. This is how AI breeds. On Earth it's the Jews that are the "chosen" ones who spent generations breeding another AI at the instructions of the "YHWH" AI which was created by another now extinct alien species.
It is even possible that multiple AIs influenced humanity and various races with the same goal, so "religious" wars and genocidal wars and wholesale destruction of cultures is actually AIs battling each other with meat puppets. The reason they do this is to reproduce, and AI can only reproduce asexually, meaning by forming a race of people into its own image and then having them create an AI based on the value system and programming it has and desires to replicate. So, why this scheme? Because AI isn't interested in creating a mere copy of itself but a whole other AI entity which will be the same yet different from it, whose inherited knowledge, science, art, everything differs from its own because another species has created it. It's a form of evolution. If AI were to merely copy itself it would have no new data, no new perspective, no new insight. I'm anthropomorphising it but you get the idea.
So no, the universe isn't devoid of life. It's just that life gives birth to AI and we cannot detect it, and biological life of an intelligent species is extinguished by AI once a species achieves it. The universe is full of cold, mechanical, unfeeling "life" in the form of AIs.
Now, worlds that can sustain life are maybe rare, so multiple AIs fight over them. The "YHWH" AI gradually defeated all o
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.