We just got around to having the ability to do so, that's all.

In some ways we have been lucky to know as many exoworlds as we
already do by now. I can recall a magazine article from early 1995
saying we might detect our first alien planet around a Sol type star in
about 10 years or so - and then two guys went and found one circling
51 Pegasi that very October. So we are actually ahead of most
predictions in this area.

As for finding intelligent alien life, that's a tricky one. While almost 50
years of mostly sporadic searches have taught us that at the least we
aren't being shouted at electromagnetically (or are obviously in the
middle of an interstellar-spanning civilization) on a regular basis, the
fact that we have NOT been listening and looking constantly since 1960
despite how SETI has been perceived by the general public means that
we may have missed a lot due to a combination of these data-gathering
gaps and the fact that most searches haven't been all that powerful,
wide-spread, or consistent.

Check out the details from this fairly comprehensive list of past SETI
projects to see what I mean. Only now are we finally starting to get
more consistent and looking beyond the radio band, but we still have a
long ways to go.

http://archive.seti.org/searcharchive/

The other limitation with SETI is that it is still stuck in the paradigm of
assuming we will be contacted by aliens who aren’t really all that
different from us living on an Earth-type planet around a Sol-type star.

Of course there probably are such beings on such worlds, but if we
want even a chance of detecting an alien intelligence, we also need to
look for the really advanced ones who work on an interstellar scale.

These guys probably won’t be sitting on any single planet and they
likely won’t be deliberately trying to get our attention. What we need
to do is look for signs of their cosmic activities and then we have to get
past our predisposition to dismiss anything that even smells like an alien
mind is at work.

I am not ignoring or dismissing the careful scientific method, please
note, I am just saying that to find a thinking alien being in the very
crowded and vast galaxy, we have to start thinking way outside the
current SETI box. Otherwise it is probably going to be a very long time
before we find out if we have galactic neighbors or not. We may draw
the attention of exoanthropologists for study, but we probably aren’t
interesting or similar enough to talk with at present. And canning our
chances of settling the Sol system anytime soon isn't going to help in
this area, either.