Meanwhile, in this life, some dogs and cats were apparently being eaten, so we get this: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-is-sinking-its-...

That just means that the first people making contact with the object will not be speaking English, not that it will not happen at all

The most amazing thing to me (after reading Wikipedia on this very-recent classification of "Interstellar Object"), is that only two prior have been confirmed, and all in the last decade.

By this point it looks like they are not that rare. Lets just hope the next one does not have enough delta-v to change its trajectory to intercept us - at a couple dozen km/s. ;-)