In earth's natural history, only about 1% of species last longer than 15 million years. For mammals, the average species lasts about a million years. Humans have been around for about half a million years have had spaceflight and telecommunications for about 50 years. That's about the length of time human civilization has been detectable to aliens and vice-versa.
Even if the galaxy was teaming with life, advanced civilizations would be just as rare out there as they have been on earth. It would also take an extremely long time for them and us to expand into an interstellar empire.
The vastness of space, like the oceans, invites us to ponder what lies beyond. Since the oceans are much easier to reach, that would be a better use of money than manned space exploration.
If the goal is to preserve humanity, we should be more worried about what happens here in the near feature and let our descendants figure out how to colonize outer space. If we ever do encounter an alien civilization, it will most likely be intelligent robots created by some extinct biological race.
It seems the distant future will just be robots talking to each other, if that. It's possible that such civilizations already exist and only interact with other robots. I think the 1958 short story "Crabs on the Island" by Anatoly Dneprov might be playing out on a universal scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igROsVAk7fY
https://biblioklept.org/2019/01/25/read-crabs-on-the-island-sixties-soviet-sci-fi-by-anatoly-dneprov/
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