It's abstractly possible, but you have to tell one hell of a Just So story to get them there. Foreign life forms are embedded in the same physics we are, and most likely experienced the same basic life-and-death fight for every resource that our species did before our intelligence explosion. There's many ways they can be different than us, but there's a lot of ways that any intelligence embedded in the same universe as us must be the same, too. I think people get stars in their eyes and put way too much focus on the former quite often.