The more planets they find, the more miraculous our existence. All those millions of planets and not one are sending out radio waves proclaiming intelligent life.
We’re still the only planet with chocolate.
I’m thinking it was Sagan, but it may have been someone else, who was asked several decades ago what they believed would be the most amazing discovery in the history of mankind. He replied ‘To discover that we are alone after all.”
On the contrary, I’d suggest these results provide more support for the Anthropic Principle, and the “perfect” conditions for intelligent life in our solar system could well simply be the random result of having 160 billion shots at achieving those conditions just in our galaxy alone.
Well they very well could be sending out signals, but we’re only monitoring the section of carrier waves we actually use (which is about 10%) and most of these planets are far enough away that if the first thing we’d done after we invented radio transmission and aim it at space our signals wouldn’t even be halfway there yet assuming it even managed to have enough strength to still be readable. Light speed is actually pretty slow when you get to celestial distances, and void is really hard on any and all forms of transmission.
That’s probably because the waves they are sending out, are so far in advance of ours, that we don’t even know how to recognise them. Sort of like trying to explain how a tv works, to a sea slug.
We've only been "listening" for a few decades and haven't even begun to come close to scratching the surface considering the sheer numbers of planets out there.
And then there's the Wow! Signal so maybe we have heard something...