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Explaining sampling bias can be very difficult. I'm personally of the belief that intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations capable and willing to communicate are extremely rare in space and time. That is, they need to be close enough physically to communicate, and exist during the same period when another civilization exists that is willing to communicate. I call this the "flashbulb effect". Winks of civilization that briefly flash across the galaxies.

A response I frequently get to this reasoning is that there are so many billion billion billion stars and galaxies that if civilizations like ours were so rare, the odds of our existence would be infinitesimal. And that since we exist there must be lots of other similarly advanced civilizations out there -- surely we can't be the only one or one of just a handful scattered widely.

But the point is that if we didn't exist we wouldn't even be asking the question. That's the sampling bias. If we were the only intelligent civilization in the universe, being one in a trillion trillion odds, we'd have no way to know at this point, since if we hadn't "won" that cosmic lottery, we wouldn't be here to ponder the question.