My guess is that JWST or a similarly powerful telescope might find biosignatures in the atmosphere of a nearby exoplanet in the next decade or so, if there is indeed life on them. But don't hold your breath for what we think "intelligence" will be. I personally feel like the combination of interstellar colonization making little economic and biological sense, and the risk (or even potential violence) of misunderstanding between different intelligences over interstellar differences, leads me to idea that our universe is full of shut-ins who never leave their home systems or attempt to communicate beyond them. I love Contact too - it's my favorite movie of all time actually - but I have to admit that Sagan's vision of a cosmos full of enlightened technological beings is kind of naïve.

So with that, I'll just be content if we can answer the question of LIFE itself existing beyond Earth in my lifetime. To me, that'll be confirmation enough that non-human "intelligence" is somewhere out there, just as it is still here on Earth too.