This is a very charged subject; but I suspect that if they are unfathomably advanced; they certainly will not be angry charging chimps. They would be smart enough to know we'd be scared and aggressive and would probably fire first. They'd want to avoid all that silliness.
So they would not land on the White House Lawn. Forget that Hollywood garbage.

They won't be invading earth for our diamonds, not when some stars are made of diamond. They would not be in need of our oxygen. Our atmospheric pressures, might not be to their liking; our star might be far too dim; our gravity far too heavy. They don't need our livestock for food nor our water to drink. They don't need our land, as there is plenty of real estate in space. We have to rid ourselves of what Hollywood and Television has presented to us; Angry Klingons with dark eyebrows intent upon conquering half a galaxy. It doesn't work that way except on bad television episodes. The really smart creatures cooperate. Thankfully we are insulated by the light years and too primitive to understand how to tap into the wormhole rapid transit system. We are the violent ones; the primitives of the primitive. Not them. We would frighten them. Just look at the dim primitive creature who currently holds the office of the Presidency. They'd hot foot it out of here so damn fast when they discovered that fact....

at any rate; if it takes you 900 years to build a starship; you won't be playing with nuclear weapons....

I think you are probably correct that many of the Hollywood cliches will be incorrect. But I have no reason to believe that just because they are advanced technically, they will be "nice". The rest is just wild speculation.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

An interesting notion, that. Extraterrestrials have kept their distance from us because they're actually *afraid* of us. Could be. I'm enough afraid of a wasp's sting to avoid its proximity, even though my species is vastly advanced in neural complexity and technology, in comparison. Suppose for a moment that we are on the ragged edge of sorting ourselves out on this planet. The cold war certainly appears to be over, for example. Could this time of transition, if that's what it really is, interest extraterrestrial anthropologists enough to bring them here, in spite of the danger? It wouldn't necessarily have to be pure black and white-- either land on the White House lawn or stay away altogether. Some limited sort of contact might be considered. Ross

"too much star trek syndrome"

Recall that space is big, really really big.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

It seems that on the way to creating a technology sufficiently advanced to travel the galaxy, one capable of destroying the civilization on the home planet is created first. If a species doesn't destroy its own civilization, it may not be irredeemably violent, and may live to travel the galaxy. Ross

Stop a moment and think about the last time you stomped on an ant hill.....

I think I stopped doing that sort of thing when I grew up and stopped being teenager. Now that does not mean that I have not tried to exterminate ant colonies since then, I have but not simply for the fun of it or because I was bored. When I have done such things as an adult it was because the ants were on my turf and becoming an infestation and a nuisance. It which case I used more scientific extermination tools to erradicate them rather than just kicking the hill.

Therefore providing the aliens do not allow their children to "play with guns" then it would only their adults we have to be concerned with. In which case unless we are intruding on their territory, stealing their resources, making a mess of their backyard then they will probably ignore us or at most discretely observe us. Only if we become a nuisance or a threat would they be likely to try and exterminate us. In which case they would probably do so very quickly and efficiently and without us probably even being aware it was aliens doing it to us.

As has already been said it is hard to believe that any species capable of interstellar travel would be that interested in any resouces earth had to offer. There are plenty of other places out in space to obtain those and in much larger quantities.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

So you throw in a political swipe just to make sure? Not all adults have left that behind them.It appears you are projecting your own attitudes onto others--onto aliens, in fact, which has gotta be more unsure than onto humans, and everyone knows the myriad pitfalls in that.

"To Serve Man."

(Now I was going to add a link to explain this quote to the Great Unwashed, but I'm still stupefied that my first google return was by a superstitious person who professes to believe that aliens are on Earth to eat us.)

RBG

And it seems to me that there is no evidence that this is true. There are in fact many counter-examples in science fiction (not that this proves anything).

Maybe the civilization consists of violent, competitive carnivores, that developed their technology trying to kill each other off, and the most violent of them all went out to conquer the galaxy.

Maybe they are extreme xenophobes, who love each other, but hate any intelligent lifeform that isn't them.

Maybe it is like the anthill that JustAFriend - they don't recognize us as intelligent beings (everyone knows that only plasma creatures can be intelligent and that intelligence can not arise in "solid" forms).

Now, I don't know that any of these are possible, and maybe the OP is right. But the bottom line is we don't know and anything beyond that is just wild speculation.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Or not even any hatred is involved -- they simply exterminate any potential competition BEFORE it becomes a problem.

Obligatory SF reference: The Killing Star
They're Made Out Of Meat

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Now I'm all hungry...

Preemption -- the definitve solution to any potential problem.

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

The idea that "any society sufficiently advanced enough to travel through space will also be advanced enough to avoid violence," is a very old one. It pops up in the words of scientists in '50s movies all the time, usually just before they try to make peaceful contact with the advanced aliens and are destroyed by them. See for example The Thing From Another World, in which the scientist Carrington makes almost that exact argument.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Another notion is that given the interaction of two forms of life, the more advanced form will ultimately devour the other.

Personally, I think that advancement is not a sign of a lack of desire for violence. It is just a sign of advancement in technology.

Many things can be inferred- but not known without study.

And I personally disagree with it. Oh I don't think they will be the slavering beast fiends from beyond, but our own experience with first contact has shown that meetings between different cultures can have drastic results. It only takes one to make war. I agree it will likely require large scale cooperation within culture to build a star-fairing civilization, but even if that includes their entire species, it doesn't rule out xenophobia. If anything it enhances it.

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I think those violent, competitive carnivores you mention would probably destroy their own civilization *completely*. On Earth we have already gotten to the point where even limited use of our most potent weapons would destroy the ecological underpinnings of civilization, as well as the rather fragile infrastructure that masks it possible. Ross

I think, this too, is a vague assumption at best.

I am aware of real scientists, in the present day who reach a similar conclusion, though not on so questionable and simplistic a basis as merely equating technological accomplishment with benevolence, without careful explanation. Such shallowness can be excused in a motion picture, especially one made in the 1950's, when the cold war made fear of the 'other' an even more serious problem than at present. It would have made sense to them to set up an idealistic 'straw man', then see him destroyed as a consequence of his own naivete'. None of that constitutes a reasonable argument. Ross