Alternate Dimensions for Communications
To communicate with other civilizations or search the COSMOS for alien life, scientists have used archaic radio waves. It's highly doubtful a very advanced civilization would use radio waves because their propagation is blocked by objects and it just takes too long to reach a destination in the overall grand scale of the Universe.
It's very likely civilizations hundreds of thousands of years aged, or millions of years, would have developed communication in alternate dimensions. What exactly are these dimensions and how fast can such a signal traverse space and time? One such way is to create a tunneling miniature worm hole but large enough to inject a communications signal. The wormhole could instantly lead to other places in space and time.
Advanced sensors are needed to detect artificially created small wormholes that may be used for communications by advanced alien cultures. These areas in space time would have altered space and time, and sensors that detect gravity ways and deformations in the space time continuum would be highly useful. It's possible these wormholes may cause microlensing and advanced telescopes can look for these objects.
With funding and time, this project is possible. The question is what will we do in finding intelligent life in the Universe? Once we locate higher ordered life evidence, we will want to travel there. FTL faster than light travel is another project that requires funding and time. How the passage of time will be handled is an issue to be investigated.