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I love how the different scifi franchises easily drift into very specific camps
- space explorers and scientists
- space religious fanatics, wizards and fascists
- space warriors and soldiers
- space pirates
- space goofballs
The best one to me is the space goofballs. We like to think that there is intelligent life out there. But there is also the possibility that we could run into space travellers that have no clue what they are doing and just run into us and don't know what to do and either just hand over technology to us or blow us up by accident. It could be like an intergalactic truck driver making a shipment that happened to blow an engine and decided to park here for a while, give us replicators or exotic material or something dangerous, fix their engine, kill a bunch of soldiers that gave them a hard time, blow up a few things and then went on their way, never caring what they did or what they left. Leaving us all to believe that there is intelligent life out there that wants something to do with us because we think we are important.
There's a good book by John Scalzi called "Old Man's War" that's worth looking up. It's about a future where they take old people, and transplant their brains into young bodies, for use in Space Battles (thinking they are old/wise/intelligent, but with new healthy bodies). It's a deeply philosophical book (despite being somewhat funny at times), that jam a bunch of the above tropes together.
And then there's The Culture novels.
Which has all of those things :)
(Edited to fix bad grammar!)
The Culture novels are... what?
Whoops! Edited my bad grammar.