I was reading something a while back that was refuting the assumption that intelligent life is inevitable once life forms. They discussed how there are actually multiple one in a billion thresholds that are incredibly hard to overcome in order for a species to contact us: Life forms Multi-cellular life forms. Apparently this is an enormous gap Intelligent life forms Species develops ability to communicate across the cosmos Species develops ability to travel across the cosmos Even still the universe is so enormous that it's all but certain that these conditions have been met over and over again. However, an additional issue is that we have a perception of ourselves being exceptional from a time perspective; that if aliens exist, they exist right now, and would be intelligent right now, and able to contact us right now. The time scale we exist on is unfathomable, and yet we assume that it would just line up conveniently when we decide we are ready to receive a message. Aliens could have existed IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM a billion years ago, 100 million year ago, a thousand years ago, and we still likely wouldn't know. It's only been in the last 120 years that we even had radio signals, so short of them actually visiting us there has been no way for us to even receive the message until incredibly recently. To put this in perspective, this is like if someone somewhere in the world threw a baseball in any direction at some point during your lifetime, and you had to hit that ball without knowing who or where or when it would be, and you only get one swing...oh, and you only find out about this game on your 79th birthday and in all probability you already missed it, and you are also blindfolded. TL;DR there is and has almost definitely been a bunch of life in the universe but it's incredibly unlikely that we happen to hear from intelligent life in our neighbourhood right at this particular time