Without an official disclosure of the alleged extraterrestrial presence (see my new series "Knowing the Future: 9/11, CIA, UFOs, and the Extraterrestrial Presence" for details) SETI may offer the best chance for making contact with something "out there."
SETI's search is based on conventional communication technology (radio telescopes) so any contact will probably involve technology not too much more advanced than our present day civilization.
There's plenty of debate going on about future means of communication beyond radio: gravity waves, propagating torsion (spin) fields, and sub-quantum telepathy, to name a few.
Most of these ideas are "way out" and probably "not even wrong" but it is worth recalling that gaps exist in our understanding of the unification of the physics of the very large with the very small. There is potentially a "breakthrough physics" waiting to be discovered that might lead to radical new means of communication.
ABC NEWS has an interesting article about SETI, where Seth Shostak discusses what he believes we will find when our radio telescopes finally make contact with ET.
The article quotes Shostak:
"I think that if there's a conscious intelligence out there, it's synthetic."
There are plenty of reasons to believe that Shostak is correct. ET may very well be synthetic.
The problem faced by human EBEs -- not "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities" but "Earth-bound Biological Entities" -- is the vast gulf in technical knowledge between the human race and "synthetics" which may be millions or billions of years more advanced.
"Synthetics" will probably use some form of "telepathic Internet" for communication. One might even imagine a vast super-cosmic Internet shared by vastly differing "synthetics" with varying levels or hierarchies of access.
A cosmic Internet may require highly exotic solutions for "superluminal faster-than-light-speed" communication -- perhaps involving a radical new understanding of quantum theory.
One idea for how this might be possible comes from Antony Valentini's version of quantum pilot wave theory. If Valentini's hunch is correct, "synthetics" might utilize "non-quantum"matter to build their cosmic Internet infrastructure.
The situation here on Earth might evolve rather quickly if one of the "Synthetics" decided to experiment with EBEs, such as human brains, by interfacing them with access to a limited level of the "Cosmic Internet."
