Also if the goal was to find life, searching would not be optimal. It would be better to launch pods that self expand to nearby planet, make their own pods, and go to the next nearby planets.
13.7 billion years old, with a window of detection of about 1,000,000 years (evolution to self-extermination).
Maybe I'm just a dumb human, but I really don't see why a supergenius race would invest the resources in scouring the universe. Unless it was their manifest destiny. In my head a narrative to address this crosses from sci-fi into fantasy.
Another night be that consciousness exists at many physical levels. Just like you are made of trillions of automata of cells and bacteria, which are played out by proteins and DNA, maybe the universe is a single consciousness, and we are but one part. Or a part of a part.