Whether we ever get to know?

Does "Whether we ever get to know" mean "Whether we will know"?
It seems that I've failed to get the nuance of the word "ever".

Context:

Even if that civilization is not more advanced than ours at the time
of transmission, the enormous distance between us entitles us to
calculate that they must be millennia ahead of us by the time the
message reaches us (unless they have driven themselves extinct,
which is not unlikely).
Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very
probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of
being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could
possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as
supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant trans-
ported to the twenty-first century.