They are millions of light years away, but there is no absolute time frame in which our observations could be called "old" or "new". You can choose to think of far away things as "the past", if you like. But the point is, that doesn't make it any less cool.

EDIT: Actually, I missed your point, which was that far away things have less history in which intelligence could evolve. This is true, but the amount of history we can observe is still staggeringly large. Far too big to eliminate the paradox.

You only have to miss the right time period by several thousand years to miss signs of (intelligent) life.

Someone remotely viewing earth with just a 10k year delay would not be able to measure signs of human life.

They would see exactly what we see elsewhere - nice possibly life-supporting planets, but no signs of any functionality.

Now realize we aren't just missing 10k years but 1000k years (at best).