I think there is something called the Drake equation for you fanatics to actually see how much life could be in the universe. There are countless stars and such in the universe. All of which are moving away from each other as is expands, as theoretically proven by the Big Bang. Not to mention other things. When I did the Drake Equation myself, I got like 78. 78 freaking worlds that possess intelligent, evolving life that can communicate. Problem is, that's 78 in how many stars, some of which being star systems (like ours)? Estimates of 100 billion?
Problem is, there's so much crap in our skies now that we often have:
1. People who are public fa*s and crave negative publicity by saying they saw an alien while walking around drunk and falling into the front yard into a coma
2. People who see things like flying saucers when they are blimps
We can only go so far at a time. NASA and such are right now scouting out Mars via a rover-probe thing. I believe the Space Race had started in the 1950's-60's, and thus which gives us around half a century. Half a century leads to slowly growing endeavors, of which we have scouted out 8 of the 9 planets in our solar system. However, we have only marginally glanced at around 6 of them, and around 2 or so have been or are currently being examined by probes. Looking for life would be senseless at this point because of that.
Plus, if we do find contact and actually merge races, I'm very sure that we will have all these ethical issues relating to how humanity treats them.
No flaming me for this, no remarks please, I get PO'ed about how people are gullible enough to take some autistic moviemaker's concept and attempt to make it a reality. If you bring up topics like such, expect to see me there