If there are other intelligent life forms (as in having at least human-level intelligence) in our galaxy, we probably won't meet them. If they truly are intelligent, they will cross the galactic street the moment they see us coming.
Yeah yeah, the old spiel about how we are not really all that smart and aliens would avoid us.
As if there is any reason to believe that alien intelligence wouldn't go through the exact same problems as we did, would be just as short-sighted or narrow-minded as we were.
Evolution is not a process that creates perfect things. It creates surviving things.
That can mean nasty things - like the willingness to kill others for their resources. The ones that didn't kill for the resources when they weren't smart enough to find an alternative? They died out.
At least we are aware of our imperfections. It might not be enough in the end, but it might also be.
There can still be other reasons to avoid us, of course. Heck, any form of non-organic intelligent life might be different that we would have trouble communicating with each other or recognizing each other. They might not want to interfere with us. They might simply have decided that trying to contact other life is pointless, as the chances of finding any is too slim, and focus on themselves and their star system.
And of course, the more likely thing is they aren't actively avoiding us - they are just too far away.
The inverse square law is the issue. Transmissions degrade over distance very rapidly. Given that ours aren't exactly strong to begin with, you'd have to be looking pretty darn hard with extremely sensitive detection equipment even just at a light year out.
Indeed.
IIRC, something like 95 % of the signals send to the Voyager Probe are used just for error handling. And that's where we really make an active effort to send a strong transmission at logn distance.
And Voyager is only about 0.2 % of a light year away.