What are the time-scales involved in system formation, the evolution of a technologically sophisticated culture capable of doing what you say, sending probes ou

What are the time-scales involved in system formation, the evolution of a technologically sophisticated culture capable of doing what you say, sending probes out (at sub-luminal speeds) and reporting back? Isn't that reason enough to estimate that while there may be such advanced alien societies, we will never have the possibility of contact? Or through a vanishingly small chance, happen to find ourselves in a system relatively near one of those 100-400 billion stars around which such an advance civilization had earlier arisen?