Personally, I’d die of fright if a tinny, faraway voice were to respond “yeeeeees there is.”
Obviously the probability of our planet being the single repository of life in the universe is so low it’s ridiculous. There has to be life somewhere, no? And lucky them; one day Voyager will crash on their planet and these intelligent creatures who live on a devastated dump will spend years, decades, centuries attempting to decode the golden disk that the Voyager carries.
One day they’ll succeed, and they’ll go “ooh” and “aah” at the pictures of our blue planet, smack their lips and immediately set out on a space mission(The golden disk conveniently includes directions). Immediately being relative, as no space mission can be undertaken without planning, and these intelligent creatures are the size of a well grown hippopotamus with a voracious appetite. So they have to solve supply chain issues, and select the bravest and most resourceful among them to cover the enormous distances between their place (Did I say it’s a dump? They don’t think so, they like their barren planet with constant sunshine and no humidity. It’s just that they’ve run out of FOOD) and our place.
Here they come. Like a swarm of genetically modified (and overweight) butterflies they come fluttering through space. (No biggie for them; they’ve been doing space walks without breathing apparatuses for the last few millenniums) They smile benignly, showing off excellent, pearly white teeth in huge mouths. They look a bit like mussels – one big mouth and not much else except for the pretty butterfly wings (retractable, made of some sort of titanium alloy that is spun into gossamer thin webs) and the legs – sixteen of them.
They land. Gravity sucks them into place. Thunk. Thunk. Thousands of them, and they smile and whistle Mozart’s Piano Concerto nr 24 (they’ve really studied that golden disk) and we’re utterly relieved. After all, creatures who can whistle Mozart can’t be dangerous can they? We approach them. They inhale. Deeply. It’s like being sucked into a wind tunnel. Adiooooooos.
My question: WTF was so naive as to assume any intelligent lifeforms “out there” would be benign? All it takes is some introspection to realize that is probably not the case, right?