I feel like I'm playing into a cliche by even giving this response, but:
Would we recognize it? Would we even know that it had happened? Consider that if there is a civilization capable of traveling across inter-stellar distances, they very likely have got a very different sort of life-span that people on earth. Because of this, their language (if they have something we would recognize as language) could be dramatically different than ours.
Honestly their brains, or "mechanism of creativity" as I guess you could call it, could be something that we would never be able to communicate with.
There are biochemical reasons why extra-terrestrial life would probably be similar to ours, but I can think of no reason why they would be neurologically or psychologically anything like us.
Think about the ants again. Ants have communications, sure, but it's not language, at least not in the human sense. Ants very probably don't have thoughts, and because they don't have thoughts, they don't have a reason to abstract them to words.
This hasn't prevented ants (or bees) from building incredibly interesting and complicated physical and organizational structures.
We've contacted bees. Do you suppose that they realize it?
What if interstellar travel is just really hard (= no advanced life form has figured it out, and it might just be impossible/not economical), and whatever signals their civilizations generate just aren't strong enough to be picked up by e.g. SETI?
It wouldn't spell "doom" unless you count the sun running out of juice/going supernova. The universe might be packed with life, each such patch effectively isolated to it's own little corner.
Would we recognize it? Would we even know that it had happened? Consider that if there is a civilization capable of traveling across inter-stellar distances, they very likely have got a very different sort of life-span that people on earth. Because of this, their language (if they have something we would recognize as language) could be dramatically different than ours.
Honestly their brains, or "mechanism of creativity" as I guess you could call it, could be something that we would never be able to communicate with.
There are biochemical reasons why extra-terrestrial life would probably be similar to ours, but I can think of no reason why they would be neurologically or psychologically anything like us.
Think about the ants again. Ants have communications, sure, but it's not language, at least not in the human sense. Ants very probably don't have thoughts, and because they don't have thoughts, they don't have a reason to abstract them to words.
This hasn't prevented ants (or bees) from building incredibly interesting and complicated physical and organizational structures.
We've contacted bees. Do you suppose that they realize it?