He looked at me and said, "Mathematically, Ken, There HAS to be." Then he said, "Imagine a planet with life that is 1 or 2 Billions years older than us."
You don't even need close to a billion years of technological difference to imagine all sorts of things.
50,000 years ago we were living of of nuts and berries that we collected, plus the occasional antelope, auroch or whatever that we could kill. We lived in caves or primitive shacks, and our most advanced weapons were stones, knives and spears. One Roman legion could have taken over that world, with communications being the only problem. We could take over that world in a couple of days, with the only limitation being how fast we could drop a few soldiers here or there and wipe out the natives. That's only 1/20,000 of a billion years.
Yeah, imagine. Such a technology would literally be indistinguishable (for us) from literal Divine action. They probably would be way beyond Dyson spheres, and would be able to move planets at will, or terraform them via nanobots in a very short time. Ants would have a more successful battle against humans than we would against such a technology.