Not necessarily though. It could be a generational ship with mundane propulsion technology.
Not necessarily though. It could be a generational ship with mundane propulsion technology.
And it'd also probably have to be immortal autonomous machines rather than anything biological, which wouldn't necessarily be as useful, unless they fully merged with them or created ones that were much smarter than they are. (Which I suppose is pretty possible, given we might do the same within a century or two.)
My guess is we may unfortunately possibly be the only intelligent life throughout all of reality up until now (extremely speculative, I know), or that the few civilizations that do exist or have existed are so spaced apart from each other that it's very unlikely any will ever run into or observe any of the others without some kind of major FTL breakthrough.