I believe if life is common than there must of been at least one group of aliens that at least attempted to colonize it self everywhere in space?
Unless humans are a extreme anomaly and that most other aliens don’t really care about space exploration, and just focus on their home planet.
This plus the nature of light travel across the vast distances of space makes me assume that alien life is both possible, likely, and imo is already out there, but it's just not in a form sufficiently advanced enough that we would see it and/or it's so far away that the visible signs of life have been masked from observation. I mean our ability to see astral objects outside of our solar system accurately is relatively new, what are the odds we had the telescope in the right spot at the right time to catch an infinitesimally small blip of light from a civilization halfway across the galaxy