Or they may be reluctant to get involved but sympathetic enough to offer a select few technological advances, if we want them.
There are a lot of possibilities which don't result in full surrender or a fight to the death.
Who knows what trouble we may cause them in the future, or rare resources that we might currently not even know exist we might steal.
The time to place place mouse traps is long before there's an entire family of them living in your shed.
It'll be either extermination, or - best case scenario - capture/trap and possibly study. Any characteristics or capabilities we humans poses that they find interesting/funny/useful will be catalogued and copied. No need to keep us around.
The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships.
In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
We won’t be important, and certainly won’t be making any appreciable difference good or bad to their civilazation as whole.
Worst case scenario that I think is plausible is that they are so decentralized that one of their warlords would come over and set up an empire on top of us for a few hundred years before the central authority realizes anything.
But yes, slightly biased. No real reference material to speak of though :P
They can do that at home with all the resources available to them. Beside, why the heck would you transform an entire planet when you can build your own custom made space habitats?
Anyway, we're looking for habitable planets not to colonize them but to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
Lastly, the idea we aren’t looking for habitable planets with in the back of our minds colonies is silly, of course we actually are, we can make all the excuses we want to try and justify our real intentions.
We are on exactly the path I suggest they are likely on. Find planets, send probes, sample lifeforms if found. Send seeds. It’s the universal life force that makes us do it. It’s what life does, expand, replicate, grow, spread.
That's our assumption using technology we are already familiar with.