**The Universe (like the internet) is likely mostly bots.**
The illustration above shows the extent of human radio communication. It is a tiny sphere, with respect to the scale of the galaxy, with radius less than 200 light years.
Looking at the exponential acceleration of technology, in particular artificial intelligence, it is possible that in the next 200 years our species will be replaced by AI (or rather something that emerges out of it). Max Tegmark would call that "Life 3.0" (simple organisms are 1.0 as their behavior is heavily constrained by their genes, humans are 2.0 as we can modify our biological constraints with technology, and substrate free AI is 3.0). Life 3.0 has a great advantage when it comes to exploring the Universe and adapting to new environments.
If we stay on this planet, we will certainly go extinct at some point. This will happen either due to natural phenomena (e.g. a comet impact, the Sun expanding, etc.), our own mistakes (nuclear wars, bio-weapons, future technologies with catastrophic side effects, or any of the infinitum of possible causes), or confrontation with alien technology (I'll explain this part soon).
The same argument applies to any other form of intelligent life within the vast cosmos around us. It is therefore most likely that in the long run, the only surviving civilizations that are currently exploring space are those that created artificial general intelligence. Given the size of the Universe, the relatively slow rate at which light travels (it seems high to us, but it is rather low when zooming out to galactic scales), and the rate of technological advancement, it seems that all civilizations will be replaced by AI before they make outside contact. If they somehow made contact before that, the highest likelihood is on the arriving aliens being AI (which would give them advantage) and in case of any conflict the biological creatures making first contact would be easily defeated, and become extinct due to their lack of robustness to changes in the environment in which they evolved.
It is thus most likely that we will never talk to any biological creatures outside of Earth. We, or rather our AI descendants might make contact with their AI descendants. This means that when intelligent life starts communicating throughout the universe it will be just "bots" chatting.