By the time humanity branched out to the stars, we had long ago given up on the idea of discovering alien life.

  Certainly, we might find some kind of new microorganism somewhere. But nothing sentient.

  Nothing exciting.

  Some people believed that aliens still existed, but that we were the advanced ones, that somewhere out there a civilization lived that dreamed about us. But that was a fringe belief, more in the domain of science fiction than actual science.

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  Most simply believed that we were the only life worth bothering about in the universe, whether that was due to god or chance or chaos theory.

  In retrospect, we were remarkably arrogant.

  In any case, by the mid-21st century, we'd used up the resources of an ever-heating earth, putting profit over survival. Those wealthy and in charge were more willing to finance exploration of space than preservation, so that's where we went.

  By the early 22nd century, we were living on space stations or Mars, as well as our home planet, and sending out more and more ships to find resources to build even more.

  No one expected one of those ships to be discovered by something, someone, else.

  - A History of Inter-Species Relations by Dr. Jacob S. Grant