From the 1970s -- Thomas J Gold: "But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." and "What we can conclude from this is that we must think very widely as to what it takes to develop intelligence and not take us so much as a model of what is necessary." [Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence, p 123; Sagan editor -- CETI was the old acronym]
That’s my premise also. Will go further to say this - in our local neighborhood, there is maybe one star per square light year. However, if we move into the center of this galaxy, we find not one star but thousands or millions per square light year. In this case interstellar travel is much easier to achieve.
We don’t hear anything from that area because there is too much background noise if a civilization used radio.
There is another point - energy. Where we live is relatively energy deficient, but at the center there is an unimaginable amount of energy radiating from the accretion disk in the center as it consumes stellar material - a great place to live or move to, if you need lots of energy to ‘do your thing.’
What’s wrong with you people? You don’t have embedded quantum entanglement communicators? Sheesh!