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.
Unfortunately, I think this is the most likely scenario. Going from our modern technology levels, which are more than capable of destroying the world, to Dyson spheres is a huge leap that will take who knows how long (decades? centuries? millennia?).
Before that happens, we have to live together on a planet without blowing ourselves up or making the planet uninhabitable. As technology continues to advance, walking that knife edge of survival seems more and more difficult. The pessimist inside of me says that no civilization has been able to accomplish it.