Quite a few stars and usable solar systems started out 1 billion years ahead of ours. The sun is relatively late to the game. If a race was curious it could w

Quite a few stars and usable solar systems started out 1 billion years ahead of ours. The sun is relatively late to the game. If a race was curious it could well seed the galaxy with small, smart probes, that could watch for certain signs life, record, and report back to the galaxy wide cloud, sure speed of light means that takes a long time. Sure that may take 50k years for light speed communications to reach a central location, but it would collect whatever was of interest. Might even just be a few 100 bytes of info along the lines of somewhat evolved bipedal warm blooded beings with a basic grasp of electronics, quantum, chemistry, and atomic sciences. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. Check back in 10,000 years and see if they surprise us.