"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

That would be the up side of no one else in the galaxy (and by no one
I mean no one intelligent and capable enough to put up No Trespassing
signs and mean it). This assumes we live long enough as a species and
do not lose our will to explore and spread out in the meantime.

I have the feeling that whoever does colonize the galaxy won't be
anything like us, even if they came from us. There is no way we can
remain the same and hope to accomplish a project that will take millions
of years even if we develop starships that move at near lightspeed.

I am not assuming we can do FTL. That may be ultimately
unimaginative of me, but I have yet to see any kind of FTL drive or
method that isn't so difficult for us to accomplish for the forseeable
future that to take it seriously right now just would not be
scientific. But please prove me wrong here, thank you.

In any event, we are way too early in the game to know if anyone
else is out there, be it microbe or Matroishka Brain, so we need to
search. And yes, unless we get very lucky, it is going to take quite
a while. My speculation is that while our galaxy is not like the one
depicted in Star Trek - especially with the preponderence of humanoid
types - there are other intelligences out there, they just don't look or
act like us, which only adds to the difficulty in finding them by a species
that has yet to colonize a single new world, let along leave the Sol system.