Extremophile life as a solution to the Fermi paradox

 For decades scientists have debated the following topic, how come we don't find life beyond Earth in such a vast universe? This is the so-called Fermi paradox, and many solutions have been proposed, well, I'll show you mine.

Researchers from search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) generally try to look for alien life by looking for earth-like worlds, well at least within the habitable zone of a star, now maybe the problem is that we are not thinking far enough. Perhaps life outside of Earth is so radically different from what we know to the point that it challenges our understanding of what "life" is, making it difficult to find or contact it. Now let's extrapolate how different it could be : 

 In 1973, astrophysicist Frank Drake suggested that intelligent life could live inside neutron stars, based on this, American physicist Robert Forward published a speculative fiction book in 1980 "Dragon's Egg " which deals with a first contact mission between humans and an alien civilization that lives on the surface of a neutron star that, due to the intensity of the pulsar's gravitational field, time passes much faster on the surface of the pulsar than in outer space( as predicted by the theory of relativity).

A similar idea came in 1942 by science fiction writer Hal Clement, who wrote a short story "proof" about aliens that live in stars like our sun, how aliens live in environments where everything is in the gaseous phase, the solid state is unknown and unimaginable, and consequently life like that found on earth as well. Interestingly, in 2020 the idea gained some scientific credence when physicists from City University of New York  presented a theory that non-planetary life could exist inside stars based on magnetic semipoles connected by cosmic strings. These hypothetical beings would consume part of their star's energy to maintain their civilization, so their star would cool faster than normal, so our sun is probably uninhabited. We have now observed some stars that exhibit this behavior and so far the cause of the accelerated cooling remains unknown.

Another possible type of non-planetary life would be plasma-based life. In 2007, the researcher Vadin Tsytovich proposed that behaviors similar to organic molecules could be exhibited by dust particles suspended in plasma, under the conditions of outer space. This opens up the possibility for life or even societies within massive interstellar dust clouds. If we assume that non-planetary life or other types of extremophiles (life adapted to extreme environments by our  standards) are quite common in the universe, this may explain at least in part  why we are not finding life outside of  Earth. because our real understanding of what is the "life"  is very limited.