/goal prove alien life exists, at whatever cost
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?
see, this is how you end up being disassembled atom by atom to be used in an von neumann probe
Got a major Star Control II / Ur-Quan Masters vibes here.