The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, “If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Personally I think it’s photosynthesis. Life itself developed and spread but photosynthesis started an inevitable chain of ever-greater and more-efficient life. I think a random chain of mutations that turns carbon-based proto-life into something that can harvest light energy is wildly unlikely, even after the wildly unlikely event of life beginning in the first place.
I have no data to back that up, just a guess.
In my sci Fi that I’ve been working on has this theory being true but I also play with asking what is the point of colonization. In my story humans have colonized mars to study the fossils and what life used to be like on Mars. However the people there after a few generations separate from earth. Earth doesn’t do anything about it because not only can mars use telescopes to see our ipbm years before it arrives and have that time to shoot our ipbm before it arrives but invasion will destroy the fossils we care about. And that’s all assuming history won’t just repeat itself. Eventually the mars colony expands until it breaks into different nations all fighting echother to become the first martin superpower. So everything that earth cares about gets destroyed by war anyway and earth is pointless to mars without life and water. Eventually the sun becomes so old that everyone feels the need to move their populations to another solar system. And only then de humans discover alien life. Only to discover that it’s currently 900 billion years beyond 2024 and aliens are just now figuring out radio waves and rockets and are more concerned about developing eugenics than discovering humans.