The way I look at it is, we don't actually have a reason to believe that intelligence and especially language is a common trait that would be beneficial in a wide range of evolutionary scenarios. It took four billion years and a host of extinction events before conditions were right on Earth for natural selection to allow a speaking ape to come to life. That's a very significant percentage of the age of the universe itself.

We have only been looking at the stars in a primitive manner for, what, 2,000 years or so? We have had radio for less than one hundred? We are talking about an infinitesimally small time frame from a cosmic perspective, and yet we wonder why the universe is silent? What are the odds of looking at just the right star in just the right time to where an alien civilization is actively trying to communicate from it?

What I mean is, we wonder why intelligent life forms aren't all over. But we don't wonder how many red eyed salamanders or platypuses are present on alien worlds. There are probably zero platypuses in the entire universe anywhere but earth. We assume that "intelligence" is a generally beneficial trait that, unlike the platypus, would lead to that trait evolving over a wide range of planets with DNA or RNA or something else replicating on them.

It's a false assumption. The odds of a species that is intelligent in the same way we are evolving on another planet are just as low as the odds of an Orca or Blue Whale or Platypuses evolving on another planet. We are looking for other creatures that are just like us, assuming that our traits are de facto beneficial, even though we have jack shit to justify that assumption with.