Hi Tink,
No I do not understand the article fully...which does not keep me from expounding my ideas.
Because I suspect the Fermi situation is something of a parallel to the Michelson-Morley problem, where all you needed was this one experiment detecting aether, to wrap up science neatly into a box with all the principles of science already understood and only a few remaining details to be resolved.
Michelson-Morley came along, blew all that out of the water.
So then you got Einstein, writing things like; "If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption."
So I think our special relativity bursting open, of "Is anyone out there?" is still a-comin' down the pike. A bit more specifically, yes the aliens are here, we are already found, we just don't know how to sense them yet.