[FlamesAddiction]

I believe there is life out there, but I am extremely pessimistic about ever being able to communicate with aliens directly.

I think the best we will ever do is to communicate remotely and indirectly through either transmissions on radio or other mediums, or through planted artifacts.

The sad thing is, considering how long it would take for even communication at the speed of light, there is a pretty good chance that by the time we find an advanced alien civilization, they will already be extinct.

The barriers are just too large to overcome in my opinion. First, there is the distance barrier, which in itself is enormous. Then there is the whole time-line issue. In a universe billions of years old, you would have to hope that the alien civilization evolved at the same time as us. Being off by even an astronomically short time, like a couple of millions years, would mean we would likely miss them. Species and civilizations on our planet only last for a very small moment when you consider the age of the universe. To have 2 existing at the same time and close together in such an old and vast expanse, would take a lot of luck. I think we would be more likely to win the lottery and get struck by lightning simultaneously than we would be to meet an alien race.

And then there is the biggest obstacle in my view... even if we totally lucked out and there was an intelligent alien race close enough to us that we could find each other, there is no reason to think that we would ever be able to communicate. For all we know, they would communicate with scents and sound frequencies that we couldn't even hear, and perhaps their visual spectrum would be different (considering they would be from a different solar system). The way our vision evolved is strongly influenced by our sun.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but I think it is extremely unlikely that we ever meet or communicate directly with aliens. Not that I don't think life doesn't exist on other planets... because I do.