That doesn t allow time for even a single question and answer before we pass out of the window. I think we should bother because the prize at stake is so great. But I also suspect we are only likely to make contact when our technology is significantly more advanced. The first is that any race which manages to get a message through to us or actually arrives here in a starship will have matured beyond its violent, combative stage. Every creature on this planet looks primarily after itself.
Life seems almost bound to have a selfish streak.
So, I suspect other intelligent races in the Galaxy will be a bit like us in character - a complex mixture of passivity and aggression, altruism and selfishness. And, as with our species, there is likely to be plenty of variation from one individual of a species to another. It depends what religious belief, if any, you start out with. Some fundamentalists might be surprised by the discovery of alien life since they maintain that terrestrial life was a one-off creation of God. Fundamentalists could accommodate the discovery by suggesting that God had the capacity to create life wherever he chose.