If humanity discovers life that we can communicate with, or could have and is now deceased/moved on, what do you think might be found and how will it change 'us'?
Well, SETI has come up with nada for decades, and a number of promising searches have found nothing. At this point it seems clear that intelligent life such as us is very rare, or worse, it's an evolutionary dead end. If we do discover same, while obviously it would have some profound implications, I don't think it would change us much. Unless they have stumbled upon some fix for the unrestrained greed that has caused thousands of human civilizations to collapse and self-immolate, a path we have gone quite far down in our current global civilization.