In his Playboy interview many years ago, this subject was brought up with Stanley Kubrick. He said, “If an alien ant at my feet scrawls out ‘Let’s talk’ in the sand, I’m not going to step on him.”
An alien civilization that has mastered interstellar space travel would be so far advanced from us that they might not even be able to recognize our intelligence. We could be incapable of communicating with them no matter how hard we tried. The cities and skyscrapers we've built would be, in their eyes, no more technologically advanced than the tunnels in an ant hill are to ours.