I tend to agree, I don't think we have a good grasp on what life will be like in 50 years let alone 1000 or 10,000. My personal guesses are that we will continu

I tend to agree, I don't think we have a good grasp on what life will be like in 50 years let alone 1000 or 10,000. My personal guesses are that we will continue to make improvements in efficiency and so will produce very little leakage of communications or even heat making us nearly invisible over vast distances. Sociologically, I think we'll be very different; population growth may approach 0 while lifespan increases dramatically so we'll continue to explore the universe but will do so remotely since we just won't have the numbers to physically colonize other star systems. Even the timescale on which we live may change drastically, perception of time isn't even fixed when it comes to biology there are other species that have much faster or slower perception of time and once we being to modify our biology and augment it by integrating with digital systems we'll be able to control that sense. Who can predict what other technological advances are on the horizon, for all we know alien probes or other technology could be as small as bacteria and might just be distributed through space as vast networks of dust clouds that harvest ambient chemical and solar energy and have transmission ranges measured in micrometers. How would we even detect such technology without physically going there and examining it up close?