Intelligence is not always the end-result of evolution. The dinosaurs ruled the earth, dominating all other life for tens of millions of years. They achieved dominance without technological intelligence.

Intelligence may have merely allowed us to achieve dominance in a haphazard way. Able to dominate, but only by destroying other species, or outcompeting for resources. Not smart at all necessarily. Are we really intelligent if as a collective whole we have only done what other species have done on a smaller scale.

Individuals are smart, but taken as a whole society is more like a coalescence, a mindless machine. As far as evolution goes, the internet might be the start of what might turn into a hive mind. It might take a thousand years, but I can see how entire populations might become simultaneously and equally informed in real time, and all make the same decisions. When the whole world moves as one, maybe we'll get someone's attention out there. Until then, it might be hard for ET to find a needle in a haystack that has the right level of cognition for their tastes. And compared to a global hive mind, it is likely nobody would.

And beyond a collective right to be instantly and fully informed, could we evolve into more than a hive even, a transcendence such as described by Stephen Baxter? Could we be so integrated that we could examine one another's thoughts and memories, borrow someone else's body, even live completely in cyberspace and have our bodies simply programmed like robots. I can see it happening. Mixing and mingling ideas and thoughts, eventually unable to tell where one person ends and another begins -- who had that experience and who didn't. Emergence of a whole new kind of awareness, consciousness. When such a collective says I, each individual thinks it is him/her that said it. It might even stop recognizing separation between people, and feel alone. It might not have separate thoughts from others. An individual might think ' I am everywhere, and there is none other except myself '. And everyone would think the exact same thing.

Would such a lifeform seek companionship, by fissioning, or reproducing, or looking for ET ? Or would it go mad? Who knows.