Reaction to extra-terrestial life.

[The Grand Nudger]

It seems extraordinarily improbable to me that having only started on our evolutionary tree 5-6 billion years after much of the universe attained a state capable of forming earth like planets and begin separate lines of biological evolution, we could be the first to reach technological civilization.

Technology is just one strategy, and the majority of life on this planet doesn't utilize it. While we could concievably state that we're doing better than the majority of life on this planet - there are things which are doing even better than us. Some of those things, are precisely the sorts of things -with adaptations that would be amenable to long distance travel through space.

We've had technology for a few tens thousand years in a universe a dozen billion years old, I think the median level of development amongst currently existent technological civilizations in the universe would be several billion years ahead of us, and possess technological powers to effect changes to the observable universe which we would be totally incapable of discerning from cosmological processes.

You seem to be assuming that technology is some sort of terminus, or point towards which exobiology would be headed. Why? It didn't even "head" that way here, and if we're talking about spans of billions of years - we have a little ways to go yet before we can determine that technology even -works- here, on this rock.

To most technological civilization that had reached technological thresholds, Our. technology, a few thousand years out of the gate, would be barely discernible from no technology at all, so early it is in the billions year long course of technological development likely already experience by many others.

If we assume that some other type of life, on some other planet, that started before us (not that their life started before us...but specifically that life utilizing technology kicked off earlier and then survived...itself a tenous assumption.........) then yeah, sure, totally agree. I just don't see why we'd make so many assumptions that explicitly refer to ourselves as a species as though we were a benchmark for exobiology. The technologically advanced alien invader/explorer is just a mirror of ourselves. There's no shortage of wealth on this planet alone from which we might speculate about life on other planets, so I try to stay leery about "humanizing" some alien species.