Or maybe they are stay at home because they are waiting for people to call. Bogged down with funding issues, when there are more 'important' things like national defense, they are labeled kooks and resource wasters. At most they somehow drum up the effort to send a small group of beings to the nearest astronomical object, only to have their funding cut. In some of the worlds, science continues with probes and telescopes, while others listen to the heavens, waiting. However, all efforts to create a second home are labeled fantasy and a travesty when 'there are more important issues down here'. Finally the technological civilization collapses, either in slow decay, or in fire, or under the its own unsustainable weight, it collapsed, like all civilizations do. Then disaster strikes, maybe a few days before a new light was seen in the sky, and the sky burned, or maybe some disease broke the locks on their immunity, or some other calamity, or maybe evolution washed them over, or however, and the brief spark of mind, was over.
As of yet, this may be the fate of all intelligent life, or something like it. For all we know, a technological civilization may be just as rare as intelligent life is compared to any other kind. Or that we will ever spread throughout the heavens. Or that all are listening, but none are speaking. All life fears its death, are we ourselves brave enough to truly live?

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