Anthropomorphising human beings have successively imagined:
(i) spirits and gods in the terrestrial environment;
(ii) Selenites, Martians, Venerians, Jovians etc - within the Solar System;
(iii) extrasolar intelligences.
Brian Aldiss suggested somewhere that (iii) are as anthropomorphic and nonexistent as (i) and (ii).
Fantasy writers, Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman, have imagined supernatural beings withdrawing from Earth, thus explaining their current absence. If they withdrew, then they might return.
In Anderson's
Operation Otherworld, magic/
"goetic" beings re-Awaken and the Adversary directly addresses Steve Matuchek.
Elwin Ransom tells CS Lewis:
"'When the Bible uses that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting.'"
-CS Lewis,
Perelandra IN Lewis,
The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-349 AT p. 163.
And the Powers are also reactivated in SM Stirling's Emberverse:
"
And there was war in Heaven, John thought with a shiver.
It's the same one here, against Principalities and Powers."
-SM Stirling,
Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter Seventeen, p. 336.
But that is fantasy. If we do not expect (i) to return, then do we expect (iii) to arrive, maybe speaking English because radio messages from Earth are detectable throughout an expanding volume of space? I do not expect First Contact in our lifetimes, although I could be proved wrong tomorrow. But, as a generalization from past experience, the future is always very different from whatever has been imagined or predicted.
Even if an alien does speak English, s/he will not share any of our history or even our evolution. We cannot imagine on what basis s/he will communicate with us.
