The problem is how to recognize really alien life. The most advanced and powerful civilization in the galaxy may be a layer of semiconductor material on an asteroid near a nondescript red dwarf star.
I’m kind of in the middle. I occasionally help one of my sons and his family out with a house payment. I write a check, scan it on my computer printer then email him the image, which his mortgage holden accepts.
Don’t remember the title, but in a movie someone was trying to blackmail a politician with some “compromising pictures”. The politician laughed at him and told him releasing the pictures would get the pol 10% more votes.
There will be all manner of worlds. Worlds of simple microorganisms to “Crustaceans think like gods, and muse eternal laws, and write the music of the spheres with clicking bony claws” (“Infinity” by Rosser Reves) to forms of mind and material organization we could not understand at all.
If you are in a wreck in a convertible without a seat belt, you’re very likely to be thrown out of the car air bag or not.