True. I guess I'm assuming that given two intelligent civilizations, it's more likely they are more advanced than us. But of course I have no basis to assume that!
I see why it’s easy to assume that, but there’s a symmetry, anything that we can say about them they can also say about us…
Personally I think our first encounter with aliens, if we ever have one, is going to be more similar to plants, bacteria, etc. It will be very underwhelming.
Generally speaking, finding primitive alien life, depending how close to Earth it is, would be very bad news. It would mean the great filter is ahead of us, as Nick Bostrom likes to explain [0].
