absolutely, in the public arena, "experts" have conceded that the universe was probably too chaotic and scarce in metals until about 8 billion years after the big bang. So it's possible advanced civilizations could have started colonizing their galaxy about 5 billion years ago. All it would take it ONE to make it. If only 0.000000000001% of civilizations invent FLT or Warp Tech, where are they?
Even if 99.9999% go extinct or choose not to colonize, we should still see a giant dark spot in a galaxy. Yet, when we look up, we see nothing. This might be because we're looking in the past and by now many galaxies are in fact missing the light of stars in giant dark spots, but the light is still millions of years from getting to our telescopes, so we can observe these typeIII aliens.
There could be a problem, it's now becoming more likely that civilizations quickly evolve into machines and their living requirements would be very different of biological intelligence. We're probably making a lot of mistakes is our searching techniques as they currently stand.