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The universe is billions of years old. There's no reason to think that our arrival (as an intelligent species) is uniquely tied to this particular time period.

1,400 years is really small compared to the history of life on Earth. It doesn’t seem all that unlikely that other planets might have had millions of years of head start.

If they were building a Dyson sphere today, it would still be unimaginable. A construct of such complexity and magnitude, that we have almost have trouble _thinking_ about it.

I have a hard time thinking that any intelligent life we were to encounter would be on "our scale", in either direction. They would likely be vastly superior or vastly inferior. Think "they are ants, we are human" or worse "we are ants, they are human".

Why do you have a hard time with that? Are we some sort of special snowflake? Was life formed all at the same time everywhere? For all we know alien civilisations have been around for a billion years already.