I never liked speculation about alien life because it's far too anthropocentric. They assume intelligent life would even care about space exploration or that humans would actually recognize them as intelligent. Imagine if the nearest intelligent species are sentient trees that communicate with each other through dispersion of pollen. They could have an entire tree society, and we wouldn't see them as anything more than a bunch of trees. And for that matter, they wouldn't recognize us as intelligent either. As far as those trees are concerned, humans aren't that functionally different from a squirrel. Obviously, a bunch of trees would have little to no motivation to develop space travel and why would they?
I never liked speculation about alien life because it's far too anthropocentric. They assume intelligent life would even care about space exploration or that humans would actually recognize them as intelligent. Imagine if the nearest intelligent species are sentient trees that communicate with each other through dispersion of pollen. They could have an entire tree society, and we wouldn't see them as anything more than a bunch of trees. And for that matter, they wouldn't recognize us as intelligent either. As far as those trees are concerned, humans aren't that functionally different from a squirrel. Obviously, a bunch of trees would have little to no motivation to develop space travel and why would they?