Finding earth (or another earth-like planet with people) would be like finding a particular particle of sand on a beach.
The universe is mind numbingly big - try to imagine how big and then quadruple that size and you are still wrong.
Just the observable universe is nearly 50 BILLION lightyears in each direction (there could be more and it's expanding).
(remember the deficit/debt demonstrations of "million" vs "billion")
We are trying to observe the equal of the other side of the world with optical and radio telescopes but essentially the best observations we can make out are just at the range of the doorframe to our home.
What if there is other human-like life but it's a million lightyears away - it's all but useless to us to even find out, they are long gone by the time their light and radiowaves ever get to us (and visa-versa). Now realize the nearest other galaxies are SEVERAL million lightyears away.
We don't need to find a particular grain of sand, we just need to find a grain of sand that's a particular shape or color. How rare such grains are is the big question. Everything we know tells us that they should be everywhere, but they aren't.
We can see for 93^h^h47 billion light years in all directions. That's a pretty big ball-o-space. Plenty to observe.
And if we find ETI, even at distances that preclude ever interacting with them, it will still be the most amazing thing to ever happen in all of human history.
They are millions of light years away, but there is no absolute time frame in which our observations could be called "old" or "new". You can choose to think of far away things as "the past", if you like. But the point is, that doesn't make it any less cool.
EDIT: Actually, I missed your point, which was that far away things have less history in which intelligence could evolve. This is true, but the amount of history we can observe is still staggeringly large. Far too big to eliminate the paradox.
Organic life can be detected in the emission spectrum of even the most distant objects, without establishing any contact. In fact we can theoretically detect life at very early stages. But we haven't detected anything yet, which makes the Fermi paradox even more valid (and chilling).
The universe is mind numbingly big - try to imagine how big and then quadruple that size and you are still wrong.
Just the observable universe is nearly 50 BILLION lightyears in each direction (there could be more and it's expanding).
(remember the deficit/debt demonstrations of "million" vs "billion")
We are trying to observe the equal of the other side of the world with optical and radio telescopes but essentially the best observations we can make out are just at the range of the doorframe to our home.
What if there is other human-like life but it's a million lightyears away - it's all but useless to us to even find out, they are long gone by the time their light and radiowaves ever get to us (and visa-versa). Now realize the nearest other galaxies are SEVERAL million lightyears away.
Try this on for size http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BjHvwSvpOw