I agree, we likely have been staring at the skies for millions of years, even before we reached our ‘modern human’ point of evolution I imagine we looked to the skies and wandered what it all was about for a lot longer than we would like to give credit to.

I find it hard to believe we will ever get close to another intelligent life form to the point of a handshake, we might end up picking bio-signatures in the composition of far away planets atmosphere, perhaps even signs of artificial lighting, but that does not mean we will ever actually go there, if science is still lacking we might still not have a effective way to make the distance of space near negligible, then we have problems.

To me, from that point it makes sense that we end up sending some sort of drone technology there, even if it takes 1000 years to get there and Humans are all dead, its still contact in some format.

My point is, even at this current stage of technology we realistically and absolutely could send drones to pretty much every close by potentially habitable planet.

Im in full belief that if we ever do experience ET, it will actually be their technology sent here, nice little care package if you will.