In the timeline of our universe as we understand it, life on Earth is very new, and humans are even newer. In this sense, the search for life in the universe outside of Earth, like the ongoing project at SETI, is even newer, basically only existing from the time that humans could observe the Universe from telescopes, a little more than 400 years ago.
Our ability to search for life outside Earth using new instrumentation is even newer, originating in varying forms sometime around the 1960s, so the idea that we are likely close to finding life outside Earth is an exciting development for astrobiology.
