Transforming the biological physical
body into a biological 'pure information' 'energy-encoded'
system (well, just software, but with incredibly specific rules) is one of my favorite ideas in SF. I tried to write a book including that 10 years ago, and while I'm a lazy fiction author, the thinking experiments were great.
I called this new species "energeans", functionally termed "Maxwell organisms" in a nod to the 19th century genius. Humans individuals become 'permanent, self-consistent' organized energy 'fields' of sorts (to preserve continuity, the sense of "self", as one's energy goes through machines (as electrons probably), space (as photons), etc.
It's totally whack physics as we speak outside some incredibly controlled lab, but it's fun to think about. :)
The Fermi paradox, I agree it's probably BS (but that's really just belief as we speak). I like to use it as a reminder of some "unknown known" (that we might not know, but others do), like
"civilization is possibly very, very hard";
or "we are so far away from big boys science that we grasp at space with tiny sticks like ants carry food, being silently observed by the equivalent of humans — so, so much above and beyond our very perception";
and my nagging favorite is a hypothesis that maybe, just maybe, what we think we "see" in space is really not what's actually out there — like Bohr's model of the atom with valency etc. was/is totally fine functionally (afaik we still do basic chemistry with it?), but not at all a "picture" of reality. Hence we'd be looking for caterpillars when all there is to see are butterflies — energeians? holo-trickery? nano-robotic swarms? blackhole farming? 5, 11, 23 dimensional space? And most being non-exclusive with others.
One thing seems sure to me: the most fundamental thing we might have right now is a quantum interpretation of Shannon's information theory, and going by that, there's a long way ahead of us until we reach "hard limits". It's crazy to think what this universe allows if you give it enough time and energy.
Here's to your last sentence being true. I must admit, I have confidence in the eventual resolution in a "decently near" future (~100 years at most), but I'm increasingly worried about the chaos/transition — if history is any indication, which it absolutely is imho, it's gonna cost too many lives and too much despair for too many people, whereas some will undoubtedly manage to turn the outcome to their advantage — even better off on the other side, like the "Great Heist of 1929", and it seems to me most majors periods of intense and prolonged chaos.