It depends where in ‘time’ we are. We could be the first to reach this level of sentience in which case we’re basically alone at this level... or we’re the latecomers and all the other sentients at this level have ascended, evolved beyond our understanding, or simply died out.
The other thing is that the speed of light, as we understand physics right now, is the uppermost speedlimit. That makes going places a bit difficult as well as making communication a problem. We still can’t talk much beyond Alpha Centauri with our radio technology, and that’s with *years* of lightspeed lag on the roundtrip if we were to build such a setup.
Since the light we detect from way out there is from events which occurred very long ago, those previous light emitting structures could be gone at this moment. We are just looking at events as they happened then. We could be cogitating about entities which no longer exist. No?