Not my original concept, and I couldn't find the video wherein this gets mentioned, but there's a musician who's just kind of talking while idly strumming his guitar onstage, and he talks about sitting out and looking up at the stars with an astrophysicist friend one night. He asks about meeting alien life.
I'm paraphrasing, but effectively, the astrophysicist mentions the notion that the universe is some 13.8 billion years old. We've been actually adventuring out into space for about 50 years. So for the entirety of the universe's existence, we've been able to communicate with it in any form for about 0.000000003% of the universe's existence. But let's assume we'd been able to communicate with other species for the entirety of our recorded history - 5000 years. That's still only about 0.0000003% of the universe's existence. So even if there have been other space-faring or very intelligent species of life, the odds of them existing, communicating, and being space-faring at the same time of existence as us is effectively 0.
Not to mention the additional unlikelihood that, even if they DID exist at the same time as us, the universe is so incredibly vast that the odds of them being anywhere in our galactic neighborhood is also insanely slim.
So the odds of intelligent life existing in the same area as us is very slim, and the odds of intelligent life existing at the same time as us is very slim, but putting both together, it's even more unlikely. The most likely answer is that at any given point in time, an intelligent species is probably the only one of its kind throughout its civilization, and we are very alone out there.
Not to say it's impossible, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that the human species will never interact with another form of life like ours in any way at any point in our existence. Which makes it that much more important that we eventually learn to function as a cohesive planet instead of a long list of divided nations.
"
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."