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Originally posted by volante
There are regular space missions sent out from this planet that do nothing but look at rocks - if scientists found life on Mars, however primitive, you can guarantee that they'd be sticking probes everywhere they could to learn more about them...
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Mars is do-able. A planet elsewhere even in our own galaxy (The Milky Way) is probably not. Our missions so far are robotic for very good practical reasons. For a similar reason, they probably wouldn't be sending little gray men: The time and distance involved. Also, do you seriously believe the human race is going to be around 10 million years from now to get information from any of those probes? I don't think any of our space agencies are thinking that far ahead, and I doubt if any alien species, no matter how advanced, would be, either.
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It's just a matter of whether an extraterrestrial race has the technology or not - how advanced would we be if the asteriod that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs hit 75 million years ago and not 65 million years ago? What would we be capable of with another 10 million years of evolution?
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10 million years of evolution, and you still won't be able to bypass the realities of physics.
The common idea that evolution grooms a species for better survival through increasing intelligence and complexity actually seems to run contrary to the facts. Viruses and bacteria are the oldest creatures on earth and exist just about everywhere, including in boiling hot subsea volcanic vents and tens of miles below the earth's crust. They live in these places with nothing artificial. They are the most successful species.
By contrast, put me out in the Oregon woods on a December or January night (meaning cold and wet) with nothing artificial (no clothes, no matches, no knife, etc.) and I'll probably be dead by morning.
The sad fact (shown by the aforementioned meteor) is that if we are hit again with a large meteor, the extinctions would be more concentrated at the top of the so-called evolutionary ladder, not the bottom. That's what happened the last time a meteor hit: the viruses survived, the creatures at the supposed top of the heap (dinosaurs) did not.
Another thing that's seldom discussed is that space isn't really a vacuum. It's not totally empty (most obviously, it has stars and planets and comets, etc., in it). However, there are particles the size of dust floating around in space. There are rocks of various sizes, too. Any craft crossing an immense distance is certain to hit something like this along the way, and since mass is magnified by speed (if you drop a bullet on a formica table top, it may not even leave a mark, but shoot the bullet at 800 mph out of the barrel of a gun and you know the rest). It's unlikely a craft could make it from point A to point B, given the distances to cross and the speeds required, without hitting an object that would disable their craft hopelessly if not destroying it altogether.
My point: An advanced race would realize this and probably exert efforts toward something more likely to bear fruit during the lifetime of the species.