Are UFOs evidence that we are being visited by extraterrestrial beings?
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49 comments to Discussion Point XII |
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As a UFO is an unidentified flying object then it cannot be evidence of anything. If it were to be identified then that would be another matter entirely.
No. If we are visited by extraterrestrial beings we will all know about it. At once.
No. That’s like saying prayer is evidence of God.
knirirr said it all. Have you been on the pop Thaddeus?
No, they are evidence that there are things flying through the air that we are unable to readily identify.
UFOs are evidence that a lot of people really should not have the vote. Or children. Or sharp objects.
if, on the other hand, this posting was meant to stimulate conversation about extraterrestrials, I am more than happy to join in on that one.
And as an initial comment, if there are civilisations, of one sort or another, which trace their roots back for hundreds of thousand, or millions, of years, then I invoke the Fermi Paradox – “Where are They”.
Forget UFO’s, Where are the signs in the sky? Who believes that if we continue any even minimal rate of economic and technical growth, that we would not be able to manipulate stars in the not too (in civilisational terms) distant future.
Even if, as some have suggested, we are in quarantine, with something like the Star Trek Prime Directive, authoritarian garbage that it is, keeping others out, why can we not see any signs of the prison guards?
Has there been no expansionary civilisation in all Galactic history?
Do all technically capable species destroy themselves once they get the capability?
Does the singularity occur? Converting any civilisation into something we can’t recognise?
No self-respecting ET would come anywhere near this planet. QED
Personally I aspire to being an extraterrestrial!
RAB,
Well, your Welsh, isn’t that close enough?
CountingCats,
Do all technically capable species destroy themselves once they get the capability?
Nah, they just vote vote for a third way and slip into senescence. Just like Gunther Stent said in the 60s.
You may have to scroll down a bit to get to Dr Stent.
If alien civilisations exist, they seem strangely uninterested in the electromagnetic spectrum 😀
Just consider how much EM ‘noise’ our pissy little planet has generated since Guglielmo Marconi started the ball rolling in 1897
They’re avoiding us. You see, the aliens are looking to intelligent life.
Either that or that wasn’t an inverted cow fetus after all.
Perry,
It’s a bit more complicated than that… It’s actually rather reciprocal. We’ve been putting out strong (relatively) signals for about half a century (roughly) which is about as long as we’ve had radio-telescopes. Results… zilch. But… it’s very, tricky. Which is why my Sky dish is currently pulling in Star Trek Voyager and not the results of the Wolf 359 System Lottery. Bugger… I bought a ticket. Thats 3 Zorgs I’m not seeing again.
I disagree. If there is life out there that’s far more technologically advanced than us, I see no reason why we shouldn’t expect some of them to colonize our Third World planet the way that European powers colonized Africa and the Americas.
That nobody has yet established an East Orion Company on our world is the strongest argument against alien life that a) is more advanced than we are, and b) has interstellar transport technology.
Of course, there might be aliens that match (a) but not (b) – or we could be the most advanced life forms in this galaxy…
They’re evidence, all right. Spectacularly poor evidence.
Absolutely. Does anyone doubt that Shirley MacLaine and Dennis Kucinich are extraterrestrial beings? I rest my case.
I certinaly hope there is intelligent life in space.
I’ve always wanted to teach alien women how to love.
Robert, is your last name “Kirk” ?
Well I duuno, there’s a lot of high security clearance US personel who say there is some sort of odd activity going on.
Some details here: http://www.disclosureproject.org/
Funny, I had wondered about a month ago why there seemed not to be any more stories about UFO sightings (at least from where I was). There I was, thinking that the entire kerfuffle had finally become passe’ now that the novelty of space travel and science-fiction had worn off, and that we were back to ridiculous stories of eerie green glows surrounding religious nutcases and images of Mary and Jesus on pebbles and pizzas again.
Anyway, IMSM I doubt we’d pick up other species’ broadcasts, nor would we be heard, from anything more than 300ly distant because the weak signals would be almost completely absorbed by interstellar dust and gas. Is not our heliopause about 4 times the radius of Pluto’s orbit at its greatest? Imagine that effect stretched out over the enormous distances between the stars. Apparently, only really powerful bursts of energy from stars et al make it through all that dust, as I recall. Any alien who’s gonna hear us has to be passing within a few hundred light years and have a reallllly good pick-up.
JJM
Paul,
That’s great!
I particularly liked this line:
“It is true that our great diplomats and wise elders, such as Senator Pell, President Jimmy Carter and other international leaders have been specifically and deliberately prevented from having access to or control over this subject. This is a direct threat to world peace. In the vacuum of secrecy, operations supervised by neither the people, the people’s representatives, the UN nor any other legitimate entity have taken actions that directly threaten world peace.”
Can you imagine, giving the secret of zero-point infinite energy anti-gravity drives to Jimmy Carter and the UN?! It’d be soooo funny!
I expect the reason the extra-terrestrials are not here, besides Jimmy Carter, is that the universe is a very big place – a lot bigger than most people think. People keep assuming that galactic civilisations will inevitably look like the human social systems we are familiar with, but the economics and the political systems we know simply cannot work that way on such a scale. Imperial expansion is limited by communication times and information flow. A galactic civilisation is going to be a dust of independent, autonomous, and probably very disparate groups acting without reference to one another. Everyone will have to look after themselves. The socialists are going to hate it.
Pa,
Ever read any of Ursula K LeGuin’s ansible books? They have a loose multi-system “empire” called the Ekumen. It’s rather as you describe.
Jimmy Carter doesn’t need those gizmos. He’s got a controlled singularity that he runs on peanuts. In similar vein, and of especial interest to UK readers, there is this.
Alan,
I don’t buy the analogy with colonialism for reasons Pa suggests and also because the potential tech gap could be dramatically higher. It’s probably not like old Star-Trek out there where all the big outfits are pretty much the same. Really smart Aliens might consider us animals. Well, as long as we don’t meet those terrible Borg – except Seven of Nine, obviously.
I dunno, there’s almost certainly “things” out there but God knows what they are and it really is difficult to make contact… But I’d still like to shake a psuedopod with one some time. Robert be warned – you might get your wish.
Nick,
I haven’t read the books, but I’m familiar with the concept. It demonstrates the principle again that to build a single cohesive human-style civilisation you need some form of fast information exchange to hold it together. It either has to be a continuous occupation, with fast local communications even if it takes a while for a message to get from one end to the other (and then you can get cultural “ring species”, if you’re familiar with the concept) or you need ‘instant’ communications or ‘instant’ travel over long distances.
Because sci-fi writers are essentially writing about present day human cultures, just transplanted into a different background to allow new perspectives on them to be presented, nearly all of these stories of interstellar travel have to invent some sort of superluminal technology to make it possible. There is another way to achieve this actually, but it would take a lot of organisation. I suspect most space-farers would not bother, and would break off from their origins and not try to make contact again.
It would be really interesting to see some exploration of a future culture that didn’t try to transplant historical states and empires into space, and explored the new sorts of cultures that could be necessary in the real universe. But if you really want to do it, it is possible without breaking any fundamental rules.
For example, a simple calculation will show that if you accelerate uniformly at 1g for about 10 years, ship time, you will have travelled about 10,000 light years at the end of it. If you have a whole bunch of space colonies who all do the same thing, they can all arrange to meet up again in 10 years time, meet old friends and family and so on, after having explored very different parts of space. As far as the people back home are concerned, it’s actually 10,000 years later, but all the members of the galactic civilisation operate in their own time, and so long as they are careful about navigation, can weave their own larger world through the universe. You would of course have hundreds of different civilisations, all on their own separate timescales, all interweaved with one another. The slowest moving ones experience the ‘fastest’ time, and advance millenia in their technologies, while the fastest see the most, but stay ever-young compared to their stay-at-home cousins. (This would also explain why aliens always look like humans with green face paint.) Contact between them would be one-off affairs, thousands of years apart for the slower ones.
I think that such a social system would be more interesting than another “Horatio Hornblower in Space”, although I admit I do like them. Would you agree the real universe is potentially a lot more interesting than our imaginary one? There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in “Star Trek, The Return of the Sequel’s Revenge XXVI”. 🙂
I’ve always wanted to teach alien women how to love
Your’ve watched too much Star Trek. You would have greater affinity with sea kelp.
My bet is that there’s some as-yet dimly understood quirk of physics – something to do with parallel universes and superstring theories with 2-dimensional time – which, until it’s figured out, makes it impossible for two civilizations to find each other (but after it’s figured out, makes it easy as pie.)
I find it frankly impossible to believe that there are no other civilizations in the universe, or that there are but ours is among the most advanced. Both make the Earth far too extraordinary a planet, an uncomfortable violation of the Copernican principle of mediocrity which, for me anyways, the Anthropic principle only goes part-way towards patching over. A universe utterly barren of life is too incredible to believe.
Likewise, the doomsday theory – civilizations are common, but almost inevitably self-destruct – is very depressing. I can’t really believe the universe would be so cruel … though that argument can’t be discounted so easily, especially looking at the world in the state it’s in today.
Anyhow, getting back to the two-dimensional time idea (which provides a neat framework for paradox-free time travel and parallel universes), I could well imagine that advanced civilizations would have no need to colonize other stars, as they could simply expand into parallel versions of their home planet that had for whatever reason failed to give rise to intelligent life. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re hermits: if they developed wormhole technology (another possible offshoot of a mature string theory), they could well explore the universe by instantly opening wormhole mouths into regions of interest and poking a few instruments through. Of course, the hole mouths would be of atomic size, and likely impossible to notice, so our entire planet might have been under very close observation for a very long time now, and we would have no inkling of it whatsoever.
Well, le Guin comes close because while she is by no means a hard Sci-Fi writer in the physics sense she is pretty interesting in the social sense. Her Universe is certainly one that J-L Picard wouldn’t recognise. I say “comes close” because the ansible is pretty much the bare minimum superluminal device – it’s basically an interstellar SMS. But what if there isn’t even an ansible?
I think a major issue with the coherence of society is that we’ve now got so used to “instant” communication to basically everyone on the planet. The idea of not being able to make a phone call to your brother who’s working out in the Centauri Colonies is going to be a massive issue. Perhaps we shall have to adopt a mind-set similar to those age of sail colonists and explorers or perhaps something altogether different. I see this as a bigger obstacle than technology or money. It’s the one really big thing that puts me off.
Oh, yes, it’s going to be much more interesting. It is going to be very strange. I suspect it’s likely to start when (if?) we discover an “M-class” planet somewhere close. At that point the drive to go there in at least some people* will be unstoppable.
It always amazes me quite how C19th the Star-Trek Universe is with it’s competing empires and noble-savages**… J-L P even uses a device that creates matter from energy in a complex ordered form to have a cup of Earl Grey tea! The replicator is bonkers from a physics point of view. The ultimate technological and energy intensive sledghammer to crack nuts.
There’s a sort of interesting take on space colonization in a Brian Aldiss (I think) short called something like “Paradigm of the Light Bulb”. Human colonists on a distant planet periodically receive in orbit dead-hulks full of dead humans… These were earlier colonists whose slower ships had failed… Now, we’re all used to the idea that leaving first doesn’t mean you arrive first but the time scale here is of centuries. It’s a bit like I hop into a 767 and land in the pre-colonial Americas only to find years later a wreck wash ashore with the name plate “Santa Maria”…
CC,
Now don’t be disgusting… We all know that alien women look just like us except for interesting cranial ridges and the like.
Apologies, Thaddeus. This is getting to be quite an interesting thread. At least we’re not arguing the toss of the definition of “totalitarian”!
*And not just Dale Amon.
**Prime directive.
Long one; sorry. I have drawn a few tentative conclusions on the matter – I know you don’t care…
1) It goes without saying that there is sentient life out there somewhere – we are here, so it follows that they are there (I’ve seen the probability calculations, but I get a headache looking at big numbers – and I get suicidal if asked to DO anything with them. Anybody else out there suffers the downside of Heinlein’s “mathematics separates humans from apes” bromide?)
2) It also goes without saying that, we being a very young sentience orbiting a recent star, some of them are a heck of a lot older than us, and have solved the problems associated with space travel. If they are solvable.
3) If they did come here, they didn’t see fit to stay.
Note that (3) above does not indicate that they did not come here – merely that colonising, coming often enough to be caught in the act, or making contact with us for whatever reason, was not worth their while. I draw the following tentative conclusions therefrom:
A) We have nothing they want. Our advancing technology has made many formerly large industries and precious commodities obsolete – think whaling – and if we convert to solar-powered hydrogen-based transport, our massive oil industry will follow it. I imagine thay’re thousands of years ahead of us, have gone through numerous similar cycles, can make pretty well whatever they require, and are left cold by our primitive stick / rock industries.
B) We would be of definite interest to them, because our planet is evolving both life, and sentient life. Planetary life is probably rare, so we’re a model well worth studying – but their nanotechnology is almost certainly far more advanced than ours, we could likely sneeze-out one of their main observatories and not notice it. It’s real important not to meddle in a study model for fear of skewing the result, so they are doing their best not to let us see them. Just don’t blow-up the middle bush… ;))
Space travel is fast, easy and cheap – pick any two. Humanity having leapt out of the volcanic ooze since we invented money, I suspect that an alien society would also be capitalist – and freight charges are clearly a bear to them too. We’ve devoted a whole lot of effort to synthesizing stuff, from ersatz gasoline to artificial colouring, flavouring and 3 B-vitamins; here too they have thousands of years of lead, so why would they bother shipping stuff all the way here, and what would we pay for it with?
I conclude from their stubborn refusal to come visit us, that space travel is not routinely feasible and is best kept for special purposes, i.e. study. There have been lots of little tidbits suggesting we are being watched – and we would certainly watch a case of proto-sentience breaking-out in another species on this planet, to see how it panned out – but the analogy I use is humanity studying the deep ocean basin. We discover a new species every time we go there, but it’s dreadfully difficult to go there at all, and we’ll almost certainly never colonise the Challenger Deep.
Why would we bother?
Far too many commenters here share a defect from Star Trek. Assuming that aliens would have fundamentally human values, not only that but fundamentally, western or even English-speaking values (as opposed to the specifically 20th century American values that all alien species tend toward in Star Trek).
I assume that there are other sentient intelligent species somewhere in the universe and have no strong opinion on whether they’re around monitoring us on a regular basis (or if we’d be of any special interest).
If there are other species capable of monitoring, visiting, us, they might choose to not do so (or conceal their activities) for lots of reasons, ethical, aesthetic, or alien motivations that we just can’t fathom.
And a species that can perfect interplanetary travel might also not have too many problems in concealing their tracks and fooling our (still comparitively basic) technology. So I do assume that most/all UFO sightings are not products of extra-human technology and that most or all stories of abductions or persistent contact are either cons or sincere but wrong belief.
There are other possibilities too, if they’re alien enough, we might not be able to perceive them at all (because of the restricted ranges of the human senses. Or they might be hiding in plain sight (like Jane Goodall among the chimps) and we just don’t recognize them for what they are and so politely ignore them…
Would aliens necessarily have the same ethics and morals as us, since ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have an absolute objective existence, or could intelligent lifeforms in this galaxy possibly turn out to be post-modern socialists?
PA Annoyed:
You said: “For example, a simple calculation will show that if you accelerate uniformly at 1g for about 10 years, ship time, you will have travelled about 10,000 light years at the end of it.”
Relativity throws a monkey wrench in the works. The calculations also show, if I remember correctly, that you would have had to use several large stars’ lifetime worth of energy to do it. It takes a good bit of energy to accelerate even subatomic particles to near-light speeds. To reach the Andromeda galaxy, assuming you convert mass into energy with 100% efficiency, you need 4,100 tonnes of “fuel” per kilogram of payload. To be able to also stop at the destination, you need 4.2 thousand million tons. The fuel-becomes-payload problem just kills the concept, you kind of HAVE to start looking at more exotic stuff, like wormholes.
@Thaddeus
Given the number of ‘fast moving lights in the sky’ type UFOs are probably just satelites and re-entering space junk I would say that UFOs are more likely evidence that we are extraterrestrial beings.
@ Robert
You really think you can compete with the orgasmotron?
@Pa Annoyed
Sounds kind of like “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman, though that is the only Sci-Fi novel I can think of that has that kind of situation.
Most UFOs are evidence of the ability of the human brain to make patterns out of noise. The rest are evidence that, as Wogan used to say, “They’re not all locked up yet.”
Is there life out there? Almost certainly yes. The idea that the development of life which occured on this planet has not happened elsewhere in the Universe is almost impossible to believe.
Is there intelligent life out there? Well for some value of “intelligent”, probably yes. I did read an SF story* which predicated intelligent life in the first few moments after the Big Bang, which made a certain kind of sense.
Why haven’t we met them, or even heard them? Well most of the reasons have been given above, but to re-iterate:
The Universe is very very big. If the light speed limit holds, then the time and energy to find this tiny needle in such a huge haystack is prohibitive. There could be billions of intelligent species out there all looking for each other, but only one or two in this or any Galaxy.
It has been postulated that intelligent species either die out or “trancend” in a relatively short time. The chances of two species being in the same technological timeframe is low.
Perhaps there is a way round the light limit which involves the extra dimensions that current physics predicts, but perhaps when you get there you can’t get back, or don’t want to ‘cos the beings up there are really cool.
I’d really love to meet intelligent aliens, even nasties like the Darhel or Posleen, but I fear it won’t happen in my lifetime, unless the definition of my lifetime changes radically in my lifetime.
* I really should check my suberbly laid out and catalogued library so I can credit the author, but searching through boxes in the spare bedroom right now does not appeal.
Plamus,
Yes, if you have to carry your fuel with you. The mass of the fuel, and the fuel to accelerate the fuel, and the fuel to accelerate that, and so on, results in an exponential increase in fuel to payload ratio. But is there really no other way than our ever-so-human ‘stick full of explosives with a man on top’ approach? Is there no way to perhaps collect it en route? There are of course many other problems to be solved, not least of which is that every bit of space debris you run into hits you at near lightspeed. But these are the sort of future-tech questions we can envision answers to, unlike superluminal travel that does not at the same time allow time travel.
Regarding sex with aliens; humans have had sex with weirder things, not all of them even animate. Having heard about some of the stuff on the internet, ‘girls’ with hairy tentacles sound pretty normal… and maybe some of them would feel the same way about us. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t happen, but I’m not about to speculate any further. I asked about alien moralities and ethics, but the idea of alien sexual perversions leads into waters too deep to plumb.
Is there no way to perhaps collect it en route? There are of course many other problems to be solved, not least of which is that every bit of space debris you run into hits you at near lightspeed.
Bussard Ramjet type technology perhaps? Although the act of pcking up the fuel would exert a braking influence.
As far as debris goes, shine a high energy laser ahead of you. Ultra violet laser maybe? Or an X-ray one. Would reduce everything to plasma, making it easier to pick up as reaction mass as a side benefit. The closer you get to C the more energetic the laser would appear to the outside universe, and the more effective it would be.
I thought ST XXVI was the one where they find some astrophysical phenomenon that they have seen before, and the writers don’t need to invent a new particle to deal with it.
And then there was Star Trek XXVII, which I think was already released as either “V for Vendetta” or “Red Dawn.”
I come down on the optimistic side of Fermi’s Paradox.
As to why we haven’t made contact…actually, we have.
It’s just that the contactees were treated by the “visitors” as: a) pets, b) meat, c) sex objects,
d) targets for alien “spam”, or, e) alien geeks looking
for fellow players of “World of Warcraft”.
Any surprise that nobody really believes them?
Meanwhile, the truly mature alien cultures are just waiting for us to grow up.
Countingcats,
Yes, that was the sort of thing I was thinking of, although as I understand it, Bussard’s design has since been determined to be impractical because of the drag effect you mention. However, I think the problems that undoubtedly exist are just a matter of needing clever engineering to solve. You’re moving through a plasma, which allows all sorts of currents and extended fields and non-linear effects, for which it is very difficult with our current state of knowledge to say that it couldn’t ever be used to construct some sort of ‘engine’. It feels like an engineering problem, unlike superluminal effects which are, at present, fantasy.
Other possibilities are immortality, when it doesn’t matter how long it takes and you can just plug into virtual reality to avoid getting bored, and transmitting people in digital form to robot bodies sent there the slow way by one’s ancient ancestors. Many more could be devised, I’m sure.
my guess is that if a technology that allows intersteller travel exists it will be somyhing we, as of yet, havn’t even conceptualised.
sailors in the 15th century trying to conceptualise ion engines springs to mind.
All those Aurora Project stories now make UFO stories seem passe I think.
Not only have they visited, they are among us.
“Hillary Clinton” is clearly an alien.
Let’s try the process of elimination.
You see an object in the sky. There are three possibilities:
1. You’re hallucinating.
2. It’s a natural occurance that you are mistaking for a craft.
3. It’s a flying craft of some sort.
If you can eliminate 1 and 2, then you are looking at an actual artificial object. There are two possibilities:
1. It is man-made.
2. It is of alien origin.
So, if you see an actual craft in the sky, and it does something fantastic, like make a 90-degree turn at 6000 miles-per-hour, then you are looking at not just evidence, but proof that aliens are here. As a famous Englishman once said:
“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
— Sherlock Holmes
Spectre,
Maybe so, but the problem is that there are so few people who can really tell what is impossible and what isn’t. Sherlock Holmes was fictional and so never really said anything, but in the stories was noted for his cases where things seemed at first to be impossible but it turned out that they weren’t. For example, if you shine a searchlight up at low level cloud, it is very easy to get a light travelling 6000 mph and turning sharp corners. There are enough other ways of doing it too. People always underestimate their own propensity to be fooled. A stage magician will quite clearly do things that I know are physically impossible – should I therefore assume it is real magic?
Eliminating 2 is very hard, much harder than you might think, and you also have to consider option 4, that you’re lying, and faking a UFO for fun and fame. It’s amazing how many people lie about such things, and how many people will fall for it.
If they’re so smart, and don’t want us to see them, why do they always turn the headlights on when they fly at night?
If they’re so smart, and don’t want us to see them, why do they always turn the headlights on when they fly at night?
Duh. To avoid bumping into things Bluebottle?
A friend of mine has pointed out that aliens, having advanced technology, should have advanced stealth technology, so they should be able to hide from us completely.
As for parallel universes, aren’t they supposed to be incommunicado? Isn’t it supposed to be impossible to reach them? And even if you could, those nearest us are supposed to be those most like us, so they might try to colonise us as we’re trying to colonise them! You might need to go through many universes to get to an uninhabited earth!
As for ‘victims’ of alien abduction, how many people are aware that the human body naturally paralyses itself whilst sleeping? If your head woke up free from this natural process, but with the body still under its’ influence, it would seem as though you had been paralysed. the rest could be a dream inspired by the experience.
I have to say that I have not come across anything that needs an alien hypothesis- lights in the sky could be from all sorts of natural phenomena, or top-secret government projects.
“I find it frankly impossible to believe that there are no other civilizations in the universe”
I think a lot of people think that if there’s one intelligent species, there must be others. But you can reduce that to absurdity. Why not also say, if there’s one intelligent species which loves chocolate, there’s another one out there somewhere? And hey, why not imagine that if one species likes chocolate, likes to get sun tanned, and plays football, there’s got to be another out there in all those 10^[large number] stars that’s just the same?
We can’t estimate the probability of intelligent life forming on a planet, in the way we can estimate the probability of lottery numbers being selected.
I find it easy to believe there is only one civilisation within a travellable distance of the sun: if there were to be more than one such civilisation, one had to be first – why should that one not be ours ? If there are others, where is the evidence ?
This discussion is great fun, thanks Thaddeus!
One of the most imaginative resolutions of the Fermi paradox I’ve come across is the one in Accelerando by Charles Stross. All the alien civilisations go through the singularity, convert all the matter in their solar system into computronium, and stay put. They don’t travel far because they’ve become so intelligent that the time and bandwidth problems of communicating over interstellar distances aren’t worth the bother.
I find that explanation quite convincing. Another is that they’re here and we can’t see them — why would we? They have technology like magic.
I’m not convinced by the “universe is very big” arguments. An old enough alien civilisation could have filled the galaxy with Von Neuman machines aeons ago.
That leads me to another daft theory I nonetheless find compelling: an alien civilisation converted the galaxy to computronium aeons ago and we’re just a simulation on some teenager’s computer. Think about it: if a metre cubed of computronium can simulate 100,000 years of a civilisation of 100 billion people in a microsecond, then by far most civilisations that will ever exist will be computer simulations.
By the way, Pa Annoyed might enjoy the novels of Alistair Reynolds. It’s space opera but without FTL travel.
Why should we assume an alien culture:
a) wants to look outside their world or is interested in travelling; or
b) understands/accepts the concept of other beings
Consider the range of cultures that exist/have existed on this planet. Many of them seem pretty bizarre to the rest of us. The chances of an alien civilization having anything in common with us (leaving ‘us’ undefined for the moment).
It is highly likely that the most bizarre, extreme forms of alien race imagined by the science fiction writers are as nothing to what is really out there. If we ever meet one, the biggest problem may well be mutual identification.
I saw a newspaper report that solves everything! A few years ago Italy had a region that had anomalous electrical activity. The report did not say what kind, but one of the suggestions put forward by the committee established to look into this is that it could be aliens testing weapons!
At last, we know our place in the Universe! We’re the weapons testing ground! That explains it all!