Alien First Contact

First contact with alien creatures is the core of science fiction literature, movies, and television; and the kind of aliens we encounter range from benevolent beings to acid for blood reptilian-like monsters. While we love to read or watch science fiction aliens, scientists actually theorize what an alien life-form could look like and how we would react to an actual face to face meeting.

Scientists feel that there are two possibilities, one being we will visit aliens from the "neighborhood" or we will be in verbal contact with a more distant alien civilization.

The article explains that if we contact alien life in our solar system:

If first contact turns out to be within our solar system, then at least we have some prior knowledge about the available habitats. Several spots might be suitable for Earth-like life based on carbon biochemistry and using water as a solvent. The subsoil of Mars may be warm enough to host microbes akin to Earth's bacteria, for example, and there could be larger beasts swimming in the watery oceans of some outer moons of the solar system - especially Jupiter's moon Europa. There's every chance that a deep aquatic ocean lies beneath Europa's ice, stretching right down to the moon's rock core, where volcanic vents pump out hot, nutrient-rich water.

Then the article goes on to explain how the aliens we talk to may exist:

And then there is the fact that in order to contact us, ET must be able to send and receive radio waves or laser beams, or use some other medium to reach across the light years. So either they are vast creatures that have evolved natural radio-wave organs to talk and listen to each other, or they have developed technology. For that, intelligence alone is not enough. "The thing that advances us as a species is that we are social," says Schulze-Makuch. "One of us alone is not very smart - I'm so dumb I can't even build a radio. It is by working together that we got on the moon."
So message-sending aliens will probably have some form of society. It need not be anything like human societies, however. "There are meta-intelligences in the societies of bees and termites. I can imagine something like a termite or ant colony that gets really intelligent," says Schulze-Makuch. This does not tell us, however, whether they will be furry, scaly or slimy. Even on Earth, clever brains come in a wide variety of packages: dolphins and primates, parrots and crows, sea otters, honey badgers, octopuses and squid.

If you love science fiction or just the idea of making contact with an alien species, I suggest reading the entire article, it is well worth the time, it will change your perception of what an alien is and how we might contact each other.

Here is a link to the full article.