Asklemmy

I understand the reason aliens get anthropomorphized for narrative purposes. I just find it lazy and ultimately defeats the purpose of having aliens in the first place. At that point you might as well just write a story about humans. The alternative is to just treat them as a mystery. The story can focus on human characters and how they interpret the aliens.

I think that sentient aliens are likely to have certain common characteristics due to evolutionary process. Presumably intelligence evolves as a survival trait to help the organism within its environment. That means an intelligent creature is likely to see itself as an individual, understand the environment around it, compete for resources with others, and so on.

However, there is a wide range of intelligence even here on earth. An octopus, a parrot, or even a cat is an alien intelligence to us. We can sort of figure out their behavior in broad strokes, but a lot of the time their actions end up being surprising and inexplicable to us. This is the aspect of aliens I find interesting.

Another aspect to consider is that it's highly unlikely that we'd run into aliens at roughly the same stage of development as us. We managed to go from living in caves to landing on the moon in a few thousand years. This is a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. The progress is also non-linear.

A civilization that's even a few thousand years ahead of us may be utterly incomprehensible. I would certainly expect it to be post-biological. This could be one reason we don't see aliens around. We might be like an ant hill next to an intergalactic highway.