Finding Vger
In one of the Star Trek movies aliens refer with reverence
to an object called "Vger", which turns out to be one of the
Voyager spacecraft that they have found, but with part of the name obliterated. In reality,
it will be at least 40,000 years before a Voyager spacecraft has a chance to encounter another
stellar system.
Even if the signal beamed to M13
is received by intelligent beings, it would be at least 52,000 years after sending the
signal before we could expect a reply because M13 is 26,000 light years away.