*sigh* this is what I always hated when people talk about "first contact". They always
always assume that we're going to run into something like this:

A stereotypical hostile alien race, advanced millions of years ahead of us and coming to wipe us out, or this:

the magical, yet still advanced, peaceful aliens looking to form a relationship which we eventually f'ck up.
The problem comes down to basic word association: when you think of aliens, you automatically think of some fantastic creature, advanced far beyond us that you saw in some movie or t.v show. The thing is, every planet had roughly the same starting point in time, so it's unlikely they're any further ahead than us. Hell, look at how many screw ups we've made just with orbiting spacestations, let alone intergalactic travel.