Direct Alien Contact. A Plausibility?

Greetings. The question "Are we alone?" has been asked since the human species first looked up at the night skies and thought about what may be "up there." From Neanderthals, to Cro-Magnons, to Homo sapiens, humans have always thought about that fascinating and still unanswered question. 

2024 has arrived, and we still don't know if life exists anywhere else in the known universe. However, thanks to the herculean efforts of scientists around the planet, we can make some well-informed and reasonable guesses. Several countries have landed on the Moon (no, the landings were not faked,) with the United States having sent astronauts to the lunar surface. Our species has sent unmanned probes to the other planets, many of their moons, and beyond the boundaries of the solar system. Soil samples have been collected and examined, thousands of photographs have been captured, atmospheric and environmental measurements have been taken and scrutinized, all in an effort to learn about the local neighborhood, and possibly, to discover extraterrestrial life. So far, no dice.

Despite the scientific results, my opinion is that we may one day find simple life forms on Mars, Ceres, Titan, Europa, or Saturn's Enceladus. We may have to send manned expeditions to definitively confirm the existence of such organisms, but such is the life of the explorer. With the risk comes the rewards. When it comes to complex extraterrestrial life, that is something altogether different and likely far more daunting of a task. No evidence has been uncovered to support the idea that complex life forms exist in the solar system, but from a numbers standpoint, the possibility that we are alone in the universe is about zero. There are likely many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations out there, scattered among the uncounted galaxies in the known universe, all at different stages of societal maturity. Some may be comparable to the human civilization, others may be far older, wiser, and more advanced, while others may be quite a bit behind us on the evolutionary civilization scale. 

In addition, there is another problematic issue that may make direct contact with aliens extremely implausible; the unlikely chance that two extraterrestrial civilizations are close enough to contact each other, and that they are at similar points in their evolution, from a societal and from a technological perspective. The distance issue is daunting, for the physical laws of the universe cannot be broken, so the effort to travel the vast distances between stars and their solar systems may be too much to overcome, perhaps impossible. The maturity issue is not as daunting, but it cannot be ignored. If our own species manages to locate an extraterrestrial civilization, let's say on a rocky planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, would it be advisable to interact with them if they are at a level comparable to ourselves in the year 1457? I would think not. We would likely have a negative impact on that civilization's natural evolutionary process, and that certainly would not be fair to the members of that society. Our only hope is that we are able to find an extraterrestrial civilization that is not very distant, in spacial terms at least, and that that same civilization is at a relatively similar point of advancement as our own. Otherwise, we may be out of luck. 

The factors at play may be too much to overcome, with random chance tipping the balance to an unknown degree, but with a little luck, and some proximity, we just might experience direct alien contact at some point in the future. Or not. 

Thank you for your time and consideration.