The time to find that life may be more than we have, because we must transcend not just vast distances, but time itself.
As far as distances go, the closest star to ours is four light years away. Four years at the speed of light. Or two years at twice the speed of light. A year at four times the speed of light... Bottom line, you must travel at incredible speeds for even short distances. And the nearest planets that could hold any form of life at all are likely over a hundred or two hundred light years away.
So going that fast is improbable. So why not cheat and go around space? This is about the only way.
But then what?
The galaxy is roughly 13 billion years old. Humanity still doesn’t have a means of communicating with enough power to be heard much beyond our solar system. So being intelligent isn’t enough. Let us say that if we were a “modern intelligence” for 100,000 years before dying out, we could have done so 130,000 times in the life of our galaxy.
Vast civilizations, thousands of galactic empires could have risen and turned to dust before us, and we would never know. Nor they of us.
“The galaxy is roughly 13 billion years old.” Now there you go again. Prove it.