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Very exciting prospect.  Looking forward to what they announce.

Somehow I doubt it will look quite like the illustration - but it would be cool, wouldn't it? 

It's just a question of time until they come (back)  

In ancient religious texts there are descriptions of flying machines (e.g. Book of Ezekiel / Bible or Hindu writings).
Very intriguing indeed. Hallucinations or did they really see those flying chariots of fire?
Then there are the Nazca Lines or the stone of Baalbek - nobody seems to have really convincing explanations.

I'm sure life is just a very common thing in the universe, and it probably exists in many forms everywhere. Even on our planet there are places where no one expected to find life, like active volcanoes in the oceans where temperature exceeds 80 C (176 F). Huge colonies of mollusks and crustaceans  are found there, and they live there without knowing that there is a something like "sunlight". They live exclusively on sulfur bacteria as the only source of organic matter, and those bacteria synthesize organic matter from volcanoes. How they don't boil there? No one really knows. They didn't expect to find any kind of complex life forms there, but life is thriving around those volcanoes.
Anyway, I wouldn't like us to meet some very advanced civilization because I'm afraid that one of the main characteristics of life is that it wants to expand. And that's what we see all around us. From viruses and bacterias to us, people, everyone wants to take someone else's place in this world. Everyone eats someone else, and there are wars everywhere for females, for food, for water, for oil, for whatever... So, I'm afraid that any advanced civilization would probably want to destroy us if they find this place suitable for them.

It would be better if extraterrestrials are on the similar level as we are because maybe that would finally unite some egocentric smart asses, and we could finally see some progress in global protection and cooperation between nations who don't like each other right now.

I watched on TV that there is a tribe in Northern Africa that celebrates Sirius, one of the stars that is pretty close to us. Actually, they celebrate the smaller star near Sirius which is invisible to the naked eye, and they do that for thousands of years. They say that people came from that star, ad teach them many things they didn't know before. They describe those extraterrestrials ad "fish people".
These natives knew that Saturn has it's own moons, and Jupiter has rings much before this was discovered. No one know how it's possible, because there things can't be seen from Earth with a naked eye.

So, let's hope Extraterrestrials can be good guys too.

Not a chance if they run big stock agencies.

Only if you disregard the actual archaeological explanations and have a fertile creative hypothesis, plus a stooge making fake discoveries to support your creative fiction. (which would be Erich Von Daniken writings) Thor Heyerdahl was fairly discredited with Aku Aku (Kon Tiki didn't prove anything by the way, it was just an interesting adventure) but I still think it's good reading. Point being, don't use interpretive fiction writing as a basis for fact conclusions. They are misleading, intentionally, to sell mysterious tall tales most of the time. Heyerdahl was just energetic and misguided, just in case I lumped him in with frauds like Von Daniken and the whole UFO / ancient astronaut crowd.

Life on another chunk of rock somewhere in the universe is just what Madelaide wrote. Which is just as exciting theoretically as little green men on the far side of the Moon... a single celled amoeba or maybe some other thing, that once lived, and is now long gone. Just finding traces of water or where water once was, is interesting.

SETI is at least research. What some people in the general public make of it, is often a joke and misunderstood. The next question would be, if we get a message, should we answer or be quiet. What if the ETs aren't friendly and need us for their lunch menu, slaves or fertilizer? 

Hey, speaking of seeing things, face on Mars! Who cares if it was upside down and a shadow, and that when we went back, it really wasn't a face at all. The people who peddle the rubbish got their attention, speaking engagements, a chapter in their fantasy book and some more fabric of conspiracy woven from invisible thread. 

Obviously I come from the Skeptical side of this debate.

Add potatoes.  

Well NASA found that there still can be life in arsenic lakes, and the organisms they found even use the poisonous stuff. Life must be abundant in the galaxies, as defined by self-replicating conglomerates, based on O, C, S, or even arsenic. It took 800 million to 1 billion years on our earth to evolve from spontaneous amino-acids to the first proto-cell, just by probability math (sorry to offend any creationists in the audience).  That was the first quantum leap.

The second one was when HSS (homo sapiens sapiens) got hold of his environment, another 2 billion years. There is no indication yet that intelligent life exists elsewhere, but if it does, perhaps they are not interested in a species that spreads its radio-waves around to shout it's very eatable.   Any intelligent xenolife will probably very hostile, that's why Hawking recently insisted to blanket our communications.

Vulcans are not hostile, but Romulans are.