Then you essentially agree with me whether or not there is sentient life out there, in practicality we are only interested in sentient life that might have consequences to us or us to them, lets get a time frame of 100,000 years since that is how old our species is (practically speaking). Which means that the hullabaloo about habitable planets is smoke and mirrors, it does not address the real question of tangible life in the sphere of consequences. So the reasoning here is that if light does not do alien sentiency justice on the scale of deep space, the only way to compensate is for them to move toward us or us to move toward them. Given the practical limits of space travel that essentially means at 0.1c or less, we can even cover 1/100th of our galaxy close enough to them to receive their communications, that they would have to move toward us and us toward them to cover 1/25th of the galaxy. If the density of sentiency is below 25 per our galaxy there is a 50:50 chance that our species will eventually conclude that the universe is devoid of sentient life except us.