Sad, but the first thing my sci-fi mind thought of was whether Earth would be able to establish relations with a perhaps-society there without establishing military superiority first, just starting off with a Cold War.
As for actual contact... many earth civilizations would rise and fall before a spaceship going at even 2% of the speed of light could reach such a planet.
Perhaps every habitable planet develops life but only our plant has developed intelligent life. Perhaps only our planet among all the planet in the universe has life. Perhaps every planet develops civilization life and all such civilizations destroy themselves within about 10,000 years, leaving only hunter-killer robots.
In any case, interstellar space is so vast we couldn't practically other civilizations even if they turned out to be quite common in other solar systems.
On Earth, high tech civilization appeared relatively shortly after humans evolved. Agriculture was independently invented half a dozen times in different places, and cities and civilization at least twice in the new and old world. We were also moving in the direction of science and technology even before we discovered coal power so the "other planets don't have fossil fuels" doesn't seem like a great candidate either.
Edit: I agree we do know that human brings on earth are likely to invent agriculture.
But I show add there is even a view with no "Great Filter" at all. That is the claim that life on the Earth has developed with a steady, linear increase in log-complexity whose zero-point is fairly close to the big-bang. And thus the human species developing now is developing about as early as it could have, as quickly as it could have and so there's no surprise that no civilizations earlier than us elsewhere exist even if we plausibly expect these civilization to be appearing now.
Punctured equilibrium is a good theory to explain particular species diversity and morphology. It may or may explain increases in complexity as such and there may or may not be a tendency for the various jumps to even each other out over time.
I'm arguing I know such a theory is true, just that things are so complex that no theory is definitive.
Or that there are no aliens, raising concerns that most civilizations inevitably destroy themselves.
Or that there are, but they haven't made contact because they don't care about us. If they don't care they might wipe us out because they want our resources, or see us as a potential threat.
Space travel is more speculative but it seems theoretically possible to reach a significant fraction of c even with 20th century technology. Even today's spacecraft could reach other solar systems in a few thousand years, which is reasonable on a geological timescale. If probes are self-replicating, or the mother civilization simply sends a lot of them, they could cover the entire galaxy in a few million years at most.
A radio signal would need to be extremely powerful to travel 500 light years without degrading (not to mention that even the senders may not be able to decode it after 1000 years :-)), and sending spacecraft to navigate 500 light years hoping it will perform all maneuvers correctly and not get hit by something in order to reach a planet without being able to send any useful information back seems naive and pointless.
If there's any space faring civilization out there, they're probably content with their own star system and maybe the ones closest to it - there are so many planets and asteroids to mine for resources (plus recycling would be a big thing) they could last for hundreds of millions of years...
Interstellar distances do prevent a lot of practical expansion, but it'd be nice to say hello to your neighbors, and start making preparations for when your star dies, or the even longer term heat death of the universe.