I doubt there is life like ours in our own galaxy because we would be able to detect oxygen in a distant planet's atmosphere. Every time an exo-planet moves between the home star and us - the star's light will shoot through the planet's edge of atmosphere and distort it ever so subtly so that we can tell roughly what that atmosphere is made of.
If we ever detect free oxygen in significant quantities, we are GOING to visit that solar system!
So I'm not convinced there isn't life in our galaxy, but if there is it is very early and hasn't flooded their atmosphere with oxygen yet.
Also, I really don't think there are civilisations ahead of us -
or their stars would be going 'out'. Unless there is magical Clarketech physics to discover, most advanced civilisations would probably be building Dyson Swarms as they grew. Given the nature of exponential growth even we are probably only a thousand years or so off having our own full Dyson Swarm! The first step is getting a viable industry and population in space or in lower gravity planets like Mars.
So much can happen from there as a space-based population starts working on building more real estate to live in like spun up O'Neil Cylinders 8km in diameter and
hundreds of km's long. Eventually only a tiny fraction of a percent of humanity would live on the earth.
As I was saying in the UFO thread, once we have a full Dyson Swarm we can dedicate a huge kilometres wide telescope to be pointed at every star in the galaxy looking for
any planet with free oxygen. I mean by then each star would probably have its own dedicated university!
Which then raises an unsettling idea. If ET have already done the same somewhere and have their own Dyson Swarm we just can't detect for some super-physics Clarketech "magic" reason - then we gave ourselves away a billion years ago when early life flooded our atmosphere with oxygen.