There's probably a great lot of "alien" life in our universe. Most will be less developed than us humans, but some will be more developed. We've been busy with "technology" for a couple of hundred years. Other species could have started with technology millions of years ago, or billions, doing things far beyond what we now can imagine being possibly. If the size of the universe is endless, and there really are more developed species, their number would be endlessly great also.

Imagine getting in contact with just one friendly kind of species similar to us, that would dramatically change our ánd their world! If we have the time to exchanging knowledge.
Not everything will be positive of course. There's always resistance against change, even if it's mend for the better. And there will also be an unintentionally exchange of nasty bugs, bacteria, and viruses. This is dangerous!

Imagine now getting in contact with a more developed species that has been in contact with countless more developed species. That would be.. embarrassing, and hyper interesting.

The power of knowledge.
If "they" would land in the center of town now, and stay for a week, we have learned almost nothing other than "there really are aliens". They are a gold mine of information, but we can't get it, because we're not ready yet. What we need first:
- Tools to quickly communicate with aliens.
- Tools to extract huge amount of information, with and without permission.
- Tools to store, manage, and understand the information.
- Tools to scan and back-engineer their tools.
All these things should go very fast thus mainly automatically.
Imagine if there would come hostile aliens. We must be able to: early detect, scan them before they scan us, analyze, learn, adapt, and react, all in a blink of the eye, or die. At this moment we have no defense what so ever.
Let's hope they are friendly.

Probably not like us.
Aliens can be so different. Much: bigger, smaller, slower, faster. Made-up from other ingredients, maybe occupy another faze of space, invisible and going straight through our mass. They may have control over the speed of time. Who knows. Let's make some more SF movies.

Much faster than light.
One thing is necessary for other species in order to travel to us from other galaxies, or even from other star systems within our galaxy; the ability to travel much faster than light. The speed of light is amazing: 299,792,458 metres per second! That's more than 7 times around the Earth in 1 second. But the distances to nearby stars is measured in lightyears. Anything interesting in our galaxy is at least hundreds of lightyears away. There are billions of galaxies in our universe, the nearest one at 25000 lightyears.
Rockets that accelerate fuel in order to accelerate their mass in the opposite direction, that has no bright future. The fastest rocket of today (the NASA Pluto New Horizons spacecraft on an Atlas V rocket - 2006) goes to about 16093 metres per second relative to its start location. A waste of energy & mass, Not healthy getting so much G force on your body. How fast is that relative to the speed of light? It's 1/18629 the speed of light. To travel 1 lightyear at that speed would take 18629 years!
Even if we could transfer our bodies and stuff into information, and sent it coded in light, to a destination where we can become solid again, that would still not be fast enough.

Warp drive
How can it be done? Can it be done? What is space, and what are we made of? Space ain't nothing, otherwise we wouldn't have to travel through it. Can the condition of space be changed so we can pass through it much faster? Can we somehow skip space and go straight to our destination? What makes distance?
It may be necessary to become massless energy beings before we can travel these distances. It's not just empty space we have to travel through, there is stuff floating in space; gas, dust, stones. We probably can't move the stuff out of our path, we have to fly through it, just like how nutrinos travel through us without interaction. I would like to make an SF movie, not a thriller and certainty not a horror, more a fascinating journey.

Information exchange, instead of inventing.
If we discover the existence of other more developed species, then what is easier? To discover ourselves how to for example fix a damaged spinal cord (how did I come to that suggestion?), or to travel to a species that already knows how to do that, and is willing to share that alien information!