Aliens probably exist in this galaxy.

They are almost certainly only plants and single celled slime because that's what evolution apparently optimizes for (because that's the absolute vast majority, like 90%, of the biomass on earth). The history of Earth starts about 4.5 billion years ago, life emerges around 3.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes about 2 billion years ago, and animal life that we would recognize as sponges (we actually would have had trouble marking the distinction between fungi and animals here) only emerges about 1 billion years ago. For some reason, multicellular animal life is hard or just sub-optimal in the evolutionary algorithm of natural selection.

For the few multi-celled creatures that are intelligent, technological, and society forming, we are almost certainly in the vast majority of all such creatures by Zipf's law or other such statistical laws. Which implies that they typical technological, society forming intelligent biological life is a human. Any others almost certainly make up small groups that would not have the numbers to establish the distribution of labor required to develop things like radio and space travel. In the history of anatomical humanity, some 3 million years, we have only had technological innovations like agriculture for the last 10 000 years or so - to be honest, for us, agriculture and society was a bad development in terms of labor time, calories, etc. We had to keep at it by Marx's laws of accumulation before we really got to the level of development of capitalism and very early socialism where we could use radio, space travel, etc.

The Drake equations pre-supposes that intelligence and consciousness is optimal for evolution - it isn't. We have it, but if you look around at our fellow species, we're the only ones who were both smart enough to develop technological society while being dumb enough to develop a technological society that can nuke itself and release enough GHG to boil everything else. The Drake equations also pre-supposes that multi-cellular life has a 100% chance of occuring - it doesn't, we didn't see the variety of animal forms until the Cambrian explosion. Not before and not since, something unusual happened in Earth's history that makes us different from a more "typical" life forming planet.

The above means we are almost certainly alone in the entirety of our future light cone. No one else is coming to save us, our galaxy and local group is likely devoid of another intelligent, society forming species like us. The void between galaxies is so large that, likely, we will be alone for more tens of millions of years. We must save ourselves and establish space communism on our own. And on a different note along those lines, I'd rather we would have figured it out on our own anyway - else we'd be some strange pet to a superior species.