There’s no evidence yet, but we also haven’t looked very carefully or in very many places. And we only know to look for planetary life as we know it.
The middle of the galaxy could have a wildly different composition and habitat for life than the outer reaches where we are.
Time is also another factor. Maybe the galaxy is perfect for complex life, we just happen to be early on the timescale and in another billion years or two life will be clearly abundant everywhere.
For some perspective, if you take the size of the Milky Way (100k light years) and relate it to the size of NYC (~30 miles), then 120 light years ends up being ~190 feet in NYC, or less than a city block.
The middle of the galaxy is unlikely to be conducive to forming intelligent life simply because it's not stable enough for long enough.
In our part of the galaxy, the mean distance between stars is around 4-5 LY (at a guess) in terms of nearest neighbours and ignoring binary (and up) systems. At the galactic center it's a few light days.
We've had many events that have caused mass extinction. There are many more that could end all life as ew know it (eg gamma ray bursts, a sufficiently close supernova. We have ~10 stars within 10 LY of us. Imagine if that were millions instead. I find it hard to believe conditions would be stable enough for the millions or billions of years necessary to create and sustain complex life.
As for our galaxy being "perfect" this touches on a coupole of concepts, notably the Anthropic Principle. But again we return to Bayesian reasoning. If there was going to be 1000 spacefaring civilizations in our galaxy, what are the odds that we are first? And while the Sun is <5B years old, there are stars up to 14B years old. There's been a ton of extra time for civilizations to develop elsewhere.
The middle of the galaxy could have a wildly different composition and habitat for life than the outer reaches where we are.
Time is also another factor. Maybe the galaxy is perfect for complex life, we just happen to be early on the timescale and in another billion years or two life will be clearly abundant everywhere.
For some perspective, if you take the size of the Milky Way (100k light years) and relate it to the size of NYC (~30 miles), then 120 light years ends up being ~190 feet in NYC, or less than a city block.