It's depressing to think that if there is intelligent life on that planet, we won't be able to communicate with them in any way in our lifetime, yet it's so close. Unless they started sending communications our way over a century ago.
It is more depressing that our lifetime is not even 100 years long. Hopefully Aubrey de Gray's predictions about longevity escape velocity would turn out to be true and we or our children would be able to wait for communications spanning multiple centuries.
If it is depressing to think about it, then why think about it? Does it have any real implications for significant outcomes about your life or is it in a way some type of FOMO?
Why is it sad at all? What would it do for you? It would be about as relevant as being able to communicate in some way with people in the past. Would be interesting and entertaining but a leap to imagine it would yield some kind of better quality of life in the current day.
I feel like the ideal of life existing on another planet would improve my quality of life. The additional potential would do wonders for my everyday narrative.
I feel like the idea of time travel, teleportation, and eternal youth would improve my quality of life as well, but they are just as likely at this point as living on another planet. I certainly don't let the fact that I won't ever have any of those things get me down.
I don't know, what does learning any fact about the universe that is not directly applicable to my life do for me? Aside from potential side-effects (it's not uncommon that knowledge-seeking about one thing yields seemingly unrelated applications)... if you have never experienced the joy and satisfaction from learning and understanding something new, I can tell you, you're missing out.
So, while not knowing and learning about civilizations beyond Earth certainly does not negatively affect my life very much, I still assert that life would suddenly get much more interesting if we did. There is a reason why Alien Sci-Fi is very, very popular...
