Where is it written that intelligent beings must create the means for interstellar communication, or any technology at all?
Imagine a planet with highly intelligent whales who have no way to manipulate their environment (hands) and no need to.
Imagine a planet with highly intelligent whales who have no way to manipulate their environment (hands) and no need to.
This happened.
The other way around: hands adds evolutionary pressure towards becoming more intelligent. (The ones that understand how to use their hands and tools better...)
Dolphins do have organs with which they pick up things like rocks or shells and they are able to give them to each other.
They use their sexual organs as "hands"! Both males and females.
In the tree of life brains are correlated much more strongly with locomotion than with hands. The moment you need to do (inverse) kinematics to plan an immediate action, and to plan sequences of motions, and to plan a hunting or fleeing strategy, is what put pressure to evolve brains, static lifeforms can be very complex and have complicated genomes, but brains you wont find in them...
All this without hands.
The fact that they are vegetarian gave us the chance to do that evolution ourselves.
But maybe water-surface-only (no land surface) is unlikely
The sea is also not all that different from an atmosphere with a higher density in principle, we live "under-air".
Maybe high density (water) makes tools less useful, and thus hands less useful,
since you cannot move a tool particularly fast under water, compared to on land.
I suppose you've tried throwing a stone underwater -- compare with throwing on land.
From this seems to follow, that creatures with human like intelligence, are less likely to appear, if the density of the liquid or gas surrounding them, is too high. (Dolphins are bright but not that bright.)