Searching for Extraterrestrial Life ("Where are They?")

I stumbled The Bloop on Wikipedia today. I innocently found my way over to SETI, which refers to the collective Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. The rest of my day was gone.

(Before you decide to make fun of me as you think about the fact that I blew my day on this - remember that you're helplessly intrigued by the space elevator)

Typically this wouldn't have happened - I can Wiki-chain or whatever you want to call it and then go on with my day. But I found that my view on the existence of Intelligent Extra-Terrestrial Life (I'll call it IETL or better yet IL) appears to be in quite the minority, at least as best as I could surmise from Wikipedia. I'll try to sum up my view thus:

There is almost certainly intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and it's probably not that uncommon. However, it is unlikely that there is life anywhere "close" to us - essentially a zero probability of being close enough to reach by either manned or unmanned space travel, and not much better odds that we are close enough to intelligent life to have any sort of one-way, let alone two-way, communication.

There's a whole Wikipedia page devoted to the topic of what's called the "Fermi paradox" - assuming IL exists, why haven't we found it? (Often, "Where are They?") Variations on my (I suppose, uninformed) opinion do exist on the page but are not very prominent, which surprised me. So I got interested in reading about this stuff (and bored at work) and ended up on all kinds of interesting pages, which I've listed below. (Some I have not yet read)

SETI
Fermi Paradox
Megastructure
Kardashev scale
Rare Earth Hypothesis
Interstellar Travel (Last one I've read)
Drake Equation
Bracewell probe
Light cone (I'm really interested in this one but haven't gotten there yet)

The article on interstellar travel seemed to imply that we might be able to reach Alpha Centauri within 50 years. The star is 4.3 light years away, or 25 trillion miles. This would require traveling 57 million miles/hr, or approximately 1,500 times the current record of 38,600 mph.

Talking again about IL, one article had an interesting take on life-favoring characteristics on earth. The moon, it claims, is the result of a Mars-sized object colliding with a young earth. This favorably increased our rotation speed, which minimizes intra-day temperature variation, and also put us at a favorable tilt on our axis (too much tilt results in too much inter-seasonal variation, but too little of such variation would slow evolution and thus delay the existence of IL)

That's all I've got for right now. Except that apparently one (very) unfortunate side effect of hypothermia is a literally-unstoppable urge to remove one's clothing.