Thought for 3.5, billion years

Life seeded out of the way, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy around a small unregarded yellow sun.

Life has launched an interstellar probe that will be in range of your sensors soon.

Would you like to write a fun research paper on the subject?

>at whatever cost

see, this is how you end up being disassembled atom by atom to be used in an von neumann probe

It would be ironic if we spent so many resources prompting and scouring the solar system for intelligence that it extinguishes ours. Those humans and their dopamine hit fueled curiosity O_o