Are we so sure that intelligent life on distant planets will follow the same path as us? Especially after reading Daniel Quinn's books, it seems far more likely that intelligent beings are living in a similar way that ancient humans did. Complex monocultures like ours seem to be the exception, not the rule, and they are relatively very short-lived (ours was started about 10k years ago, according to Quinn, while the modern human species has been around for much longer).
I don't think there's any reason to assume that other beings will wipe themselves out so quickly (why shouldn't they survive and adapt for millions of years?), but since great technological achievements seem to require an unsustainable lifestyle of conquest and over-use of resources, we might not have much luck contacting or being contacted by them.
(As I'm posting this, I realized that this post is similar to mine, and is probably better written...)