It was a machine pilot keeping a pet plant in its ship.
Only half kidding, if we meet aliens they will be machines at least to some extent. Biological life has a lot of annoying limitations and continuously circumventing them is more expensive than just becoming machines.
It’s way more likely to encounter von Neumann probes than some beer drinking alien traveling across the galaxy in compression socks and with a neck pillow.
I wouldn't be so sure. They could have a much more advanced idea of what life is, and life could have deep meaning to them, they might seek to keep their biological selves in tact and use machines only as tools. I know that's how I would roll, and I'd raise my kids that way, a group of beings like that could spawn a nation down the road with a rule like that. Or with their understanding of life and computation and intelligence and the universe, it could just be self evident to them: your form follows your function, if you change your form you change your function and you're no longer you. Sending robots, sure, becoming robots, I think you're bound to meet at least as many that don't as that do.
> “I don’t want to oversimplify it, but how are you going to fly one [spaceship]? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple,” Burchett said.
“Simple” is not the word I’d use to describe this conclusion.
