The odds of an alien race having a similar culture or language to us are remote in the EXTREME. This isn't Star Trek, where aliens are just people with funny ears. A real "alien" encounter would probably go down something like in the book (not the crapy film) Solaris - in other words, an alien lifeform would be so different, so bizarre to us that we couldn't understand each other. We'd probably just stare at each other and go our separate ways.
If we ever find each other at all - space is so mind-bogglingly big that the odds of intelligent species coming into contact with each other is also remote in the extreme. Although I'm fairly sure intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the universe, the sheer distance would make contact almost impossible. For all intents and purposes we are alone. There are billions of galaxies, containing billions of stars, and who knows how many planets. Even if faster-than-light travel was possible, finding an intelligent alien species would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack - and the haystack is as big as the SUN. Odds of us coming into contact with alien life? Close to bloody zero. I'd say it would be 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% likely
Not very likely to happen. Life in the universe would be rare - probably 1 in a million planets would have "some" type of life. And maybe 1 in a trillion planets would have an intelligent life of some sort. Given the huge, vast, enormous distances between planets, we're not going to come into contact with each other. It's 4 LIGHT YEARS to the NEAREST star! That's FOUR YEARS travelling AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT! Even if you could go faster than the speed of light, you'd need to go at least a MILLION TIMES faster than the speed of light to get anywhere. And even if you could...... 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all planets you visit would be DEAD, COLD, ROCKY (or gaseous) BALLS OF NOTHING.
I don't think many people who think about aliens TRULY comprehend how incredibly vast space is. It's just too big. Just way, way, way, way, way too big.