Quote from Slashdot:
One of the really attractive things about a Steady State Universe is that it does not require a beginning. It can be infinite in both space and time. This leaves time for the nearly impossible to occur without resort to special circumstances. It is fine for a monkey to hand us the works of Shakespeare now, if there has been infinite time already for him and his friends to bang on typewriters, but if they’ve only had 14 billion years so far, we might have to suppose they at least read the Cliff Notes. Being able to avoid those special circumstances means that the origin of life is to be expected as a mere accident. However, there is a problem with this solution to the very complex existing in less than infinite time: the monkey should be handing us a large number of copies of the the works of Shakespeare, not just one. So, the Fermi Paradox would seem to indicate that the Steady State Universe is not occurring, independent of all the observational evidence confirming the big bang.