What would alien life look like?

[AFTT47]

For my alien life I'm going to focus on alien intelligent life that is at least at our level of intelligence and civilization building.

First you gotta have limbs that can manipulate objects in your environment.
You gotta have some kind of eyes to see your environment.
You gotta be able to move around in your environment.

I'm thinking octopus like creatures that evolved and changed to survive on land.

I suspect majority of higher life that would reach the level of development suitable for creating and supporting civilization will be aquatic.

The reason is life and complex life are much more likely to evolve and be found in aquatic environments. And marine environment potentially offer vastly more developmental space than land environments.

If my guess is right, then I wonder if the difficulty with making fire and smelting metal in water means most civilization are barred from proceeding down the technical path not by cognitive deficiency, but by inability to leverage energy sources to save labor and provide spare capacity for technical development.

Well there is the thing of new niches to take advantage of. Biology isn't my thing but as I understand it, a niche not taken advantage of is a case of nature abhorring a vacuum. Some life WILL rise up to take advantage of the available niche (the land).