re: rToo Early?Too Late?, or Just Right???
As the recently late Philip Morrison said in his famous 1959 Nature paper on searching for alien intelligences:
"The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."
And for me, this applies whether they are on Earth, in the planetoid/comet belts, or around some star many light years away.
The full paper here:
http://www.coseti.org/morris_0.htm