...we're still too young and lacking in knowledge to truly understand what we see in the Universe and how to go about the right way to find ETI.

Up to this point we have been primarily guessing and making mainly sporadic efforts to look for alien life beyond Earth. Forty years in a galaxy that is 10 billion years old is virtually nothing. Even places like the SETI Institute won't be searching for signals full time untiil later in this decade.

Plus it is the height of hubris to think that ETI, especially really advanced ones, are just so eager to communicate with the talking monkeys with car keys on Sol 3.

The Milky Way galaxy alone is vast, with 400 billion stars spread across 100,000 light years. Half the estimated Earth-like planets in our star island are several billion years older than our planet (this comes from Geoff Marcy).

So what makes us so special, other than we have spent our whole history isolated on one planet, we're just waking up on a wider cosmic scale, and we still think the whole place was made just for us.