I suspect either there are no or too few planets with intelligent life to have made contact with us, or they have deemed humans as too stupid and worthless to make contact with.
If there was even ONE other planet with intelligent life, one would have expected that civilization to have eventually expanded outwards to other systems...
I think civilizations eventually 'virtualize'. It's just a matter of time before virtual reality becomes so realistic that people will want to stay there all the time. What does outer space have that can beat creating and living in your own world?
Why?
We know this is difficult with lightspeed as a hard limit on information transmission. Even with Arecibo doing its thing we’ve been broadcasting for maybe forty years.
Given the gaps, that’s nothing.
What we *can* say is that we’ve not picked up a definitive signal in the electromagnetic spectrum indicating intelligent life elsewhere.
Or they existed and fell apart (we’re a pretty young planet). Or they or their transmissions just haven’t gotten here yet. It’s a big galaxy, if you assume our earliest radio transmissions are bouncing around space in a detectable form (which they probably aren’t strong enough to, but we’ll pretend they made it just because that’s the earliest thing we’ve done that could be detected by other civilizations) they’ve covered less than 1% of the galaxy. Much less than 1%.