We share a planetary point of reference and basic chemistry with dolphins, and we know they are intelligent, but we can't communicate with them. Until we can, we're in no way ready to try to talk to anyone with whom we don't shre a planetary point of reference and basic chemistry, it is just not going to work. Ever. It's an exercise in futility at our own present stage of development.
Consider creatures that might communicate electrically or chemically, whose nucleic acids were held together by something other than ribose and assumed a completely different structure. Consider methane breathers who spend their lives cruising the upper reaches of a gas giant. Or how about silicon based creatures on carbon poor but silicon rich worlds. Imagine creatures that don't communicate by sound, radio would never have occurred to them, perhaps they went right for distance communication using quantum entanglement.
I don't honestly give a rip what they're doing with METI beyond wasting money and making arses of themselves.
Planets and moons in our own solar system formed at about the same time and out of much the same stuff and we're still not certain if anything is living on any of them, we just know nothing much here could survive long on any of them and most likely their life couldn't survive long here.
If there are hyper intelligent, technologically advanced star hopping species out there, they'll likely find us millions of years from now when one of the non functioning Voyagers is hauled aboard. They'll wonder at how primitive it is and how it managed to get out so far and track it back here. We'll be long gone, we're a fast mutating species and likely our descendants will remember us just as clearly as we remember homo habilis. You know, less than a shoebox full of bones, scattered over several locations.
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