Who's to say anything out there is sentient, though? Who's to say what could be out there would even fall under our definitions of life?
Everyone's ideas of alien civilisations are so humanised. Even if there was anything out there we could call alive it would be a totally different ball game. You base everything you know off of things you've seen, so the more you think about alien life the more wrong you'll be.
I'm not opposed to the idea of there being other life in the universe somewhere, but the odds of encountering it in the lifetime of humanity is bleak. Because we'll never know anything about it you might as well not waste your time thinking about it because everything you think will be totally wrong.
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