Decades is nothing in space-time. If you compressed the entire history of the Universe until now into a year, all of recorded human history would take place on December 31. Given the vastness of the Universe, it could take thousands and thousands of light-years before an alien signal would even reach us...at which time, we wouldn’t even exist anymore.
One rejoinder to that argument is that if there are things like 10 million year old civilizations in our galaxy, why haven’t their probes or activity been evident even to us, with the pitifully short timespan we have been looking and with the limited means at out disposal?
Of course there are many rejoinders to that argument as well.
Freegards