So I have heard people sometimes say the reason for no aliens is that complex life requires so many coincidences it is just incredibly unlikely to indecently arise anywhere else in the universe. I think it is a bit arrogant to assume all life has to mimic life found here on Earth, so forgetting the goldilocks zone for a minute, you still need life to emerge from nothing over the course of billions of years. Then you need complex life to emerge from that, and eventually civilization. But you know what else you need?
Extinction.
No extinction means no fossil fuels means no industrial revolution means no spacefaring. If it wasn't for the dinosaurs, we would have nothing. Makes you wonder what we're here for.
I conclude that any advanced alien lifeform that gets to this stage will have to use a source of power not used so much on Earth. Hydro and Thermal seem unlikely, it's less portable and requires huge facilities, so it will probably have to something else. I imagine rivers of liquid gas, a space-faring civilization built upon lakes made up entirely of methane.
Edit:
It has been brought to my attention that fossil fuels are not in fact made up of ancient dead dinosaurs, and even if they were, we wouldn't need a meteor to make this happen. I just like Dinos 
This is true, but I think it's natural human curiosity that will drive us further and further out to space even if we have figured out how to live peacefully in our own planet without slaughtering each other. Imagining a hypothetical international people's democracy flag planted on many planets out in space is pretty cool, it would be the Star Trek timeline of events
Space travel is not guaranteed in the history of humanity. The capitalists had little interest in conquering the space. In fact, space programs would have been extensively delayed or even neglected had it not for the Russians and the Soviet space program.
Human space travel had its roots in the philosophy of Russian cosmism of the 19th century (e.g. N. Fyodorov), who believed that at the rate of technological advancements they had experienced at the turn of the century, human livelihoods would soon be improved to such an extent that Earth’s resources would be depleted and the planet itself would become over-populated.
Fyodorov’s disciple K. Tsiolkovsky envisioned that a solution to the problem would be for humanity to leave Earth and colonize the stars, and started to research the feasibility of space rockets that would allow humanity to travel through the stars.
Rather surprisingly, the roots of human space travel had little to do with colonization, imperialism or resource extraction.
An ardent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Tsiolkovsky believed that the inevitability of socialism would soon make such advancements become reality, and if that were to be the case, humanity would really need to explore the outer spaces for new homes to live.
His work on rocketry would influence the pioneers of the 20th century space programs: Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth, the American and German pioneers in rocketry, respectively, as well as an entire generation of Soviet rocket scientists (S. Korolev and V. Glushko, for example). The Soviet space program would make Tsiokovsky’s dream become a reality.
Suffice to say, if it weren’t for the Sputnik moment in 1957, NASA would likely never be formed and space rocketry gained such momentum and received such generous funding by the government. Despite the fact that they had obtained the entire German V-2 rocket team, the development of space rocketry/intercontinental ballistic missiles wasn’t that much prioritized until the Soviets raced ahead of them.
I'm sure we'll send some kind of vehicle to other stars eventually, but it's a super super super super super difficult engineering task to a degree I don't think a lot of people properly appreciate. Whatever your vehicle is, like if we assume realistic travel speeds, it's going to spend decades, probably centuries or even millenia, out in the deep black with no power at all, getting hit with interstellar radiation, suffering all the ill effects of long term exposure to hard vacuum. And then, when it gets close enough to another star for it's solar cells to start working again, it has to wake up and unfold and come back to life starting from near-zero temperatures, and boot up, and enough hardware and storage has to survive for it to be functional and intelligent.
The vehicle, whatever form it takes, would need to survive the most extreme environments (other than, like, every environment on earth) for a very very very long time, and still be able to wake up and perform very complex, energy intensive functions when it arrived.
I think, if we can fix some of the shit going on right now, we will probably try. I want to meet the neighbors, even if "meet" means sending letters back and forth across hundreds of light years. *
In the future their won’t be any flags.