Distance and time are such incredibly enormous variables that we may never get any reasonable answers to the question. I think its very likely there is intelligence life, but it’s very unlikely that such life is understandable/comprehensible to us.

My guess is that if life is out there within say a 1000 light years, it is either extremely primtive or godlike in power and subtly. If that life is the latter type (say they got to our current stage 50 millions years ago) they would currently be at level so far beyond us as to make any assumptions about what to expect meaningless (think the singularity X 1000).

The notion of ET showing up in spaceships or flashing lasers signals seems silly at face value. Humans of today are beyond the capability of proto-humans 50 million years ago to even fathom. Look at how much a minuscule 1000 or even 100 years has changed us and our technology.

Conversely, if some species are out there right this very moment that happen to be near to us evolutionarily, the statistical likelihood is that they will be thousands/million/billions of light years away and we will never know about them.

What I find fascinating to consider is where along the curve of evolutionary advancement any intelligent life (us or them) eventually peters out at due to diminishing returns. Perhaps at some point in man’s near future we will quickly accelerate to near omnipotence (ala Q in Star Trek) only to discover numerous other species all at about the same level and at a point to which any further advancement is incredibly slow or non-existent. Perhaps there is an asymptotic curve so that the difference between a billion years ahead of us and a million years is negligible, although both are so enigmatic and abstract to us now that we are wholly unaware of their presence/influence/actions.