A simple counter idea to this can be summarised in one question; Why have we not made an effort to introduce ourselves to ants?

Haven't had that thought, but the total opposite. What if it's hella early, and we're still the most advanced lifeform in the universe? We're over here writing stories and making movies and games about aliens more powerful and technologically advanced coming here and fucking us up, when in reality we are the advanced aliens and everyone else in the universe is either barely sentient or still cavemen in terms of evolution and technological awareness.

The universe is too young for that to be likely.

I'd think of it like this...

• The universe is ~13 billion years old. However for the first few billion years, the universe was a wildly dangerous place to live. A sea of Hydrogen generating Supermassive stars, exploding within just 100,000s/millions of years, and generating many of the heavy elements that exist today. Even if a planet could form in these conditions, chances are it would've been annihilated before life could develop.

• I don't know exactly when the universe started to "stabilise", but let's say there is ~10 billion years of time that a planet like Earth could've formed.

• The Earth is ~4.5 billion years old.

• Single-celled life arose ~3-4 billion years ago.

• Complex multi-cellular life arose only ~500 million years ago during the Cambrian Explosion - so much needs to happen for complex life to arise that it could take a long time even in the best case scenario.

• Humans arose only ~100,000 years ago... albeit had the dinosaurs not been around for so long, we could have come about maybe 10s of millions of years earlier.

• From there basically everything comes down to how long it takes for a race to figure out farming, adopt a sedentary lifestyle that allows development of non-survival related disciplines, and to industrialise.
  In the case of humans, the oldest cultures are around 10,000 years old, and we industrialised only a couple hundred years ago.

If we make the assumption that we're not exceptional amongst any intelligent lifeforms, then it would make sense to assume that it takes roughly 3-5 billion years for a race to reach where we are now.

That means we could be late to the party, and everyone else has already wiped themselves out, but it's just as likely we're right in the thick of it but just too far away from anyone else in our cohort to see anything, and vice versa.

It's basically just the Fermi Paradox - and the only way we get an answer is when the void answers back.