> We don't carry on commerce with chimps or dolphins and they are obviously much closer to us than any alien would be.
It's a little odd to compare non-technological species with those capable of interstellar travel. We don't do commerce with chimps/dolphins because they don't have anything of value to us (at least, not that we can't just take ourselves w/force).
Plus, encountering aliens isn't the same thing as encountering aliens we'd trade stuff with. You never mentioned that qualifier until the follow-up.
I mean we, chimps and, dolphins evolved on the same planet at the same time and have vast tracts of DNA in common yet the gap is huge.
So anything evolving at a different time period in a different environment (in the unlikely event it developed intelligence at all) would be so far beyond us, we would be, at best, as interesting as dolphins. Even if their development were ahead of us by only 1/100 of one percent of the time stars have been around, that still put them a 1.3 million years in advance of us. About the divergence time between us and a chimp. And chimps do make things, they clean twigs to scoop edible bugs and use leaves for umbrellas. But we have no interest in these things and they have no understanding of our idea of commerce even if we did.
But aliens per se? Sure. Indeed there maybe even bacteria as close as Mars and Europa.
It's a little odd to compare non-technological species with those capable of interstellar travel. We don't do commerce with chimps/dolphins because they don't have anything of value to us (at least, not that we can't just take ourselves w/force).
Plus, encountering aliens isn't the same thing as encountering aliens we'd trade stuff with. You never mentioned that qualifier until the follow-up.