And I agree that there must be intelligent alien species like us out there, but what I'm saying is perhaps they're just so rare, even rarer than Drake's Equation suggests because he didn't include what a species wants to do.

Did Neanderthals or Homo Erectus want to become a technologically advanced, "civilised" species? Did most hunter-gatherer humans choose this form of society or were they replaced or subsumed by human groups that did want to do this? Look at pre-historic Europe, Neolithic farmers were known for creating segregated societies and replacing entire areas with members of their own and leading to the near-extinction of Western European Hunter-Gatherers. And that's just one case. The Yamnaya people also replaced large parts of Europe. And that's just one small continent. This happened everywhere around the planet, but mainly with our species. If there weren't any groups of "civilised" humans or if those groups were defeated by hunter-gatherer humans, perhaps we'd be just like our ancestors were for 95% of our history.

Perhaps, intelligent aliens species just didn't go down the same path because they didn't want to.