A few nights ago I watched Larry King Live on CNN and one of his guests was Professor Stephen Hawking. The subject was "Is there alien life out there?"

Hawking, who uses a computer to simulate a voice, made a joke, saying there likely is life out there, but "It wouldn't look like Marilyn Monroe!" Every time alien life forms were mentioned, the camera cut to some film of fabricated creatures that looked like soft shelled turtles crawling around.
Hawking says intelligent life forms would need legs to walk on, and arms and hand like appendages to manipulate things, and an intestinal tract but that doesn't mean they'd look anything like us. (But I don't think they'd look like turtles, either.)

There were opinions that aliens wouldn't come to Earth to harvest our mineral ores--there are too many planets out there where they could get that, and we are too far on the outskirts of the universe. And they wouldn't come seeking the opinion of higher life forms (us) because we would seem like ants to them.
King asked if television and electronic signals could be going on into space forever, and be picked up by alien life forms, as once was believed, but physicists said no. The signals fade. But the cosensus was clear--humans should not be wanting to meet with any alien life forms; it would not be in our best interest at all. It's better we should just stay out here in the Milky Way, under the radar, so to speak, and mind our own business.

susil