You'd probably enjoy Loeb's book. He makes a few key points:

- Everyone's conception of "aliens" and "space travel" is warped to fairy-tale status by the misapplication of science in popular culture. Breakthrough Starshot's basic mission is to get a probe to the nearest star in Yuri Milner's lifetime and to do that, they need a 100GW phased laser array. That plus TBD light sails 20 years at 0.2C plus this guy:

Gives you an interstellar probe. Which wants neither your women nor your water nor to be taken to your leader.

- The amount of evidence of an alien civilization is likely to be orders of magnitude more than the amount of influence an alien civilization is likely to be many orders of magnitude more than the amount of communication an alien civilization could have with us is likely to be non-zero, compared to the amount of interaction we're likely to have with an alien civilization. Unless we're dead wrong about physics, postage stamps with mylar attached is about the only craft that makes much sense. Scale it up, sure, but it's not like we're talking about a new Silk Road here.

- The majority of evidence of past civilizations available to us is trash. It stands to reason, then, that the majority of evidence of past extrasolar civilizations is likely also trash.

I don't think the unequivocal discovery of intelligent extrasolar life will be profoundly earthshaking. I think it'll be something that everyone knows that everyone knows is bullshit until the heretics start making salient points at which point a few brave scientists will say "YOLO reputations are for the squares anyway" and pick apart the research. I mean, it's been fifty years since Carl Sagan attacked the idea that the Mariner 9 results for Mars were inconclusive because at Mariner 9's resolution, you couldn't detect life on Earth, either.

There's a big faction in scientific research to assert that all the questions have been answered with the corner-case exceptions of whatever the speaker wrote his (always his) thesis on. Dogma is very much about professing allegiance to the party line and the party line is conformist AF. The guys at the margins who wonder will always be pilloried because they require everyone else to affirm or reject their dogma and most people just don't enjoy thinking, scientists included.

This thing is making me crazy and you’re not helping.

Nope. Neither is Avi Loeb. That's what scientists are fuckn supposed to do.