Yeah, but our looking is like peering at a drop of pond water (that doesn't have any macroscopic life in it) with a magnifying glass and deeming it inert. Of t

Yeah, but our looking is like peering at a drop of pond water (that doesn't have any macroscopic life in it) with a magnifying glass and deeming it inert. Of the comparatively tiny 5k or so exoplanets we've discovered most would likely be difficult for advanced life to develop as they're gas giants and of the ones we've detected we've only performed atmospheric analysis on a fraction of them. Radio signals are mostly just going to degrade and look like noise by the time they get to us. Even with a really strong directional antenna how well are you going to pickup your wifi signal that's on the other side of a major city? Life could also be teeming across the universe just as organisms that haven't learned to harness electricity.