Within the next ten years, when the most advance astronomical instrument being design and built will get into service, we will be to observe planets in the hospitable zone around other stars in our galactic neighborhood. We will then be able to indirectly detect the presence of life on these planet by the detection of the spectra of oxygen in the atmosphere or of other atmospheric substance or even the presence of large forest.
In the following decades the radius of astronomical observation will increase to 500 million light years, a radius that include our Galaxy group and will multiply the reliability of our method to assert the presence of life and even intelligent life within that radius. This means that the presence of life on earth is known to all advance civilizations within this radius.
We are the only form of intelligent civilization that we know. Life evolved 300 million years after earth formation, 4 billion years ago. Base on the cycle of stable star such as the sun, earth like planet exist for about 5 billion years; life in microbial forms exist for about 4 billion years; so a civilization can live on a given planet at most for 1 billion years on a given planet. Intelligence civilization only exist since the neolithic which is 12 000 years ago. So we are just entering this phase of intelligent life.
If traveling to other habitable planets would be a logical phase of an advance civilization, then earth would have been colonized million of years ago. It is more likely that the next frontier for us or for any other advance civilization is not territorial but it is about what was inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi : "Know Thyself"
We may soon discover ways to communicate instantly across the visible universe. Maybe there is a cosmic cyberspace where million of civilizations are currently communicating in real time. We might not be far from discovering the new physics which allow us to tune in to the cosmic cyberspace.
But we just on the threshold of the one billion period of civilized life on this planet. It is evolving at an accelaring rate. Assuming the civilization evolution is as much in the order of things as the evolution of life, then we could ask the question of its direction.
Through the evolution since the Neolithic of gradually more advance form of communications , we are gradualing thinking more and more collectively. So there might be a threshold of collective thinking that will be reached where this planet will have a consciousness, will have a being. If this is the order of things in the cosmos, then it likely that the next order of being in the universe is an order of planet beings which together will gradually reach a level of cooperations which will eventually lead to the participation into to even higher order of beings.