Thoughts/outline for a potential sci-fi movie:  Astronomers note an unusually shaped asteroid coming close to Earth, but as it gets closer it's revealed to be not an asteroid at all but a UFO.  The object goes through the usual first-contact protocols established in this sort of movie - it remains still and quiet for several days, letting Earthlings get used to its presence, and then it finally opens one portal and lets that remain open for a few days more.  Finally, the aliens inside slowly and cautiously emerge, and it turns out that they look remarkably like normal (whatever that is) human beings.  They tell the military brass that are on site to observe this first contact their appearance is just sort of a high-tech optical illusion, a mind trick, so as to not offend, upset, or shock their human hosts.  But it turns out that they didn't come to Earth to talk with humans at all - they flew all those many light years from some distant star system and solved the light-speed paradox not to talk with us intelligent apes, but they're here for the octopi and cuttlefish.  "Where's Monterey Bay?" they ask.

We can be excused for looking at cuttlefish as alien life forms - they're pretty unique and different from most anything else in the ocean, and very, very different from anything here on land.  Although they're invertebrates, there's nothing "primitive" about them - they're a highly intelligent, highly evolved life form.

We just committed one of the common errors there in looking at evolution from our anthropocentric perspective.  We humans like to think that we're the most highly evolved species on the planet, and that all of evolution was a sort of forward march of increasing sophistication and design leading up to and culminating with us.  We are at the top of the family tree, at least from our perspective.  But that couldn't be further from the truth.  We, like every other organism living on the Earth right now, all evolved from a common ancestor over some billion years or so to fill the ecological niche that we inhabit, in our case, highly adaptable terrigenous omnivores.  But even the lowliest earthworm has evolved for just as many years as we have in order to compete for its niche as a soil-burrowing scavenger. It doesn't need to read and write to burrow through soil, so why waste all that metabolism and size for a sophisticated brain?  

One of the many interesting things about cuttlefish is that a) they're not "fish" at all but cephalopods, and b) like other cephalopods (e.g., octopi) they represent an evolutionary development of large, complex brains separate from ours.  Our human brains evolved from simian brains, which evolved from mammal brains, which evolved from reptile brains, which evolved from fish brains, etc.  Cuttlefish brains never went through that whole reptile-furry mammal-great ape-homo sapien thing, but evolved along a separate but parallel track to produce a large and highly intelligent separate form of brain. It can give us insight on the potentials of what alien lifeforms on distant planets might be like.

For starters, cuttlefish brains are shaped like pyramids, but  with a hole in the middle where the esophagus passes through.  Try finding that in your vertebrate family tree (pro tip: you can't).

It's hard to tell just how intelligent cuttlefish are, because they're so different from us that it's hard to come up with comparative tests.  They can't be coaxed into running a maze for a piece of cheese, or to sit up and beg when offered a treat.  But what tests have been completed show an amazing level of sophistication and leads us to wonder if they're self aware.  That is, in their minds, have they constructed an ego-identity, complete with memory, imagination, reasoning, and a will to survive?  We once heard a definition of "sentient" that said if something runs away when you try to kill it, it's sentient.  So sure, that means that almost all animals are sentient, but we're talking something deeper than that.  Do cuttlefish have emotions, do they have hopes and dreams and ambitions and sorrows?  

Are they all awaiting first contact with the mind-cloud beings of Alpha Centauri?

Or is all they want just to eat krill?