The thing these speculations about alien life and communicating with them miss is: what if the aliens don&#x27;t <i>want</i> to talk to us?  That&#x27;s probably why you don&#x27;t hear so much about UFOs these days like we did a few decades ago: they came, they checked us out, and then they launched some beacons just outside our solar system warning everyone to stay away, along with a Galactic General Order that if we ever develop enough to send manned missions outside our system, we have to be destroyed for the good of the galaxy.