The point I was making is that there are no advanced civilizations because no technologically advancing civilization survives long enough to get off their home world.
I know, I was making another point from your point. ;-) And I don't agree that NO advanced civilizations survive long enough, we're advanced enough to colonize Mars if we'd make an effort.
They either get clobbered by some natural force; Super Volcano, Asteroid/Comet Strike, Nearby Nova/Super Nova take your pick there are a bunch of them, or else they do themselves in.
Plate tectonics was very important in our evolution. Among other things, punctuated equilibrium is very important in evolution because it culls the herd and allows new forms of life to develop. Massive volcano eruptions do that.
Nearby gamma ray bursts (GRBs) would be most problematic in areas of extremely dense star populations, like globular clusters. They have to be close enough and pointed in exactly the right direction.
If we find other solar systems with large outer gas planets to act as asteroid/comet deflectors/sinks as ours do, the inner rocky planets in those systems might have the sweet spot of just enough impacts to drive evolution, but not enough to kill everything. Of course, even our planet has experienced massive impacts that killed all surface life, but extremophile bacteria lived on deep within the Earth. Other huge impacts were survived by deep ocean life. Once evolved, it seems that life is extremely robust.
Admittedly, advanced life is far more fragile than bacterial, but even in our current state of technology, we could protect ourselves from the most likely threat, impacts, if the proper effort was made to prepare. A more advanced civilization could probably survive GRBs
The latter could be from war, natural resource depletion, disease, economic collapse; once again there are many possibilities to choose from.
We've managed to survive so far and I suspect we will continue to do so for a very, very long time after we create a proper comet/asteroid detection/deflection system.
The universe is so unimaginably huge that I'd wager that it's filled with many advanced civilizations. Our advanced communications methods will soon unrecoverably drop way below the noise floor at cosmic distances and it's only been since the 30s that we've even been detectable, a mere 84 years, an instant in time. Practical interstellar travel is extremely difficult and unless they're within 84 light years of us and just happen to be listening in the right direction, they wouldn't even know of us. If they've heard us and set out to meet us, unless they can travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, they wouldn't be here yet.
Since we are only beginning to be able to detect the atmospheric O2 (and other) signatures of life on worlds in other planetary systems, who knows how many potential exploratory targets for alien life confirmation probes there'd be for an advanced civilization to check. If they were advanced enough to send a probe here and communicate with it using faster than light quantum comm, they could undoubtedly hide them from us, too.
So, I don't find the apparent fact that we haven't been locally and obviously checked out by alien civilizations as any negative indication whatsoever that there aren't all kinds of them out there. Same goes for not hearing them. They've had only a mere 84 years to hear
us.