Aliens wouldn't land on the White House lawn.  They'd be smart enough to know this isn't a good time to land there.  Where would they land if they decided to visit?  Probably all the places they've been spotted, where their presence isn't going to have much of an impact on our society given our history in encountering such events.  <br>As for not completely understanding consciousness and the brain, we do know a couple of important things.  Survival is an incredibly important ideology among things that demonstrate the ability to live.  Things don't live to spontaneously die, they generally live or exist to have some sort of life or function.  This is the second important thing, the nature of nature is interdependence among all things.  You can't have nothing without something to know there's nothing there, and so life exists depending on the existence of other life.  Life supports the existence of other life, and is supported by other life.  The universe is probably all one whole with a lot of other whole universes supporting it, while it supports a bunch of life within it and outside of it, and in some way the nature of its survival is not far removed from our own ideology of survival.<br>Consciousness is probably the substrate where things come from and those things only exist because they were consciously conceived by some sort of thinking life.  That one key unlocks infinite complexity.  From there consciousness can expand and grow and multiply and become essentially anything and everything.  Opposite that, in a state of nothingness, maybe inside a black hole or someplace weird like that, maybe that's the real conflict for consciousness...that place of absolute ignorance and impenetrable vacancy.  It may pervade everything and conflict with everything we know about time and space, always attempting to swallow everything to a place absent of substrate and conflict.  If there's a door to nothing, it must fight the key to everything.  In that case there is no equation for life elsewhere because everything is essentially alive on this side of the door in one form or another.  Since we don't know how everything functions, or what is inside of everything, we have no context for how it all works but this universe could just be alive unless it's a hole in it that isn't alive, in which case we wouldn't ever know because you wouldn't exist to directly experience the evidence to the contrary.  Maybe we can only measure it and infer it.  Even if we did, we still would only know that much.  It would just lead to more questions anyway because the complexity is infinite.  No processor would ever compute or comprehend it because as soon as it did it would just lead to more questions and unknowns, which arise exponentially each time you figure something out.  <br>Of course there's conscious life out there, but I think the real question is how far along is the whole of consciousness in the universe compared to where it was a second ago?  What is the exponential rate that it learns and then discovers more things it doesn't know that it needs to figure out?  Do civilizations develop to figure this out on some level?  How many iterations are there of each civilization?  Of each person?  Of each piece of technology?  Of each innovation in any direction?