Kevvy2010, are you trying to troll this thread?
Jabba isn't particularly likely physically (legs and functional hands are useful for an intelligent life form): but really, there are a lot of good artists and science writers who have tried to picture genuinely alien aliens which
work. Using the movies as an argument vs alien aliens is sorta like using movie pirates as an argument against the existence of actual pirates. The odds of our evolutionary development being followed is ridiculously unlikely, unless you believe that evolution follows some sort of pre-destined arrangement. We are a series of evolutionary accidents: the Earth's environment can and has sustained body plans very different indeed from ours.
Thinking that our design is the only "working model" for a tool-making intelligence is simply a failure of imagination. Oh, the _basics_ (upright position, eyes, something like hands) are useful enough that they well might be duplicated elesewhere, but that's no reason to believe the more "humanoid" aliens will look as much like us as this guy:
(Corrupt local geniuses? Props to Pizzarro and Cortez, but I'm not sure that's a good analogy: it was disease which destroyed the native Americans. We're less likely to catch something off aliens than from a carrot).
There's three ways we're likely to
physically run into aliens. One, they come here before we develop interstellar travel. In that case they are going to be way advanced: there is no way interstellar travel is
easy. Two, we go to another solar system and they are the primitive ones. Three, we both have interstellar travel: in that case who is more advanced is a coin-flip, but given the age of the galaxy, the odds we will just be a few decades apart is poor.
I suspect any race that has been round long enough to make interstellar travel a regular thing will have learned control over its own worst impulses. After all, we're generally less mutually brutal people in 2011 than we were in the 19th century, and we have barely started to master our own brain chemistry and haven't really developed a real science of behavioral self-training.
OTOH, getting along with _each other_ isn't necessarily the same as Playing Nicely with Others. A race might eliminate it's tendency to de-*humanize members of its own species but retain an evolutionary hostility to aliens which look like birds or upright, naked, apes.
Or, in a universe where planet-killing weapons are cheap and easy to make, it might be simply the Vulcan-logical thing to make sure other species aren't wandering around out there without close supervisions. Or the aliens could be an inherently predatorial species or ominicidal Chinese Rooms (see Watts).
Still, it is probably a
decent bet to make that advanced aliens and future humans won't be as inherently assholish in the face of the other as we have been in the past: the trouble will be that what they or we think of as "civilized" ways of treating less developed races may be nontheless very unpleasant to those holding the short end of the stick...(ware the alien social workers!)
A first contact with advanced aliens coming here, unshielded by the comfortable light-years of distance and slow bandwidth of interstellar communications, will be almost certainly badly disturbing: many basic assumptions (the human-centered view of God, our place at the peak of creation, the peerless nature of our creativity and intelligence, etc.) will all be fundamentally challenged. Fundamentally new concepts of life and the universe and the place of sentient beings in it will undoubtedly be encountered. Alien culture might contain things as big as art or religion which we've entirely missed. Even if they only stayed for a fortnight and left after a big party, the world would be turned upside down.
Bruce
[1] The "contact by radio" is another option, as is "contact through finding a long-buried alien artifact on Mars or whatever".
