If we find intelligent life out there, can we trade some of our unintelligent life for some of them?
On a more serious note though, I think people vastly underestimate what space travel requires beyond say Mars. While technology will create new opportunities and advances beyond today’s imagination, it would take something that fundamentally breaks our current laws of physics to be able to travel to 99.9999999999% of the Universe.
Despite all the advances of mankind over the past 100 years, we’re still fundamentally stuck with iterative improvements on the same core principles of rocket design and thrust. There is no scenario where anything we can think of today can make space travel possible beyond our small solar system (or even within most of it). Unless or until we can find or prove something like teleportation, wormholes, etc (things of fiction today), we’re not going to get anywhere of real promise for advanced civilizations.
Even today, getting beyond a few hundred miles above earth’s surface requires vast expenses and time. Getting to the moon and back takes weeks, and getting to Mars and back would take many months and a lot of luck. Jump ahead another 100 years and without some theoretical game changer, it’s likely only the moon and Mars will be in reach.
It’s almost certain there is other intelligent life, but also possible that even if they are millions or billions of years ahead of us, there just isn’t a way to travel such vast distances and/or detect various types of communication or signals.