[Samildanach]

There are still extrapolations that should apply in general to any space faring culture. Admitedly they may not be particulalrly accurate but for instance if you look at all human cultures for example you can more or less get across a message using sign language
purely because of the way our bodies are built.
Likewise, any civilisation that has fought its way into space should have a certain number of progression paths available to them. Depending on which of these paths they chose to take will depend a lot on what their civilisation is like. Example, if they chose manned spacecraft eq xprise type of craft, they may have very advanced ship technology. If they chose the space elevator route they would tend to have more of a colective mentality and their engineering skills may well be more advanced. so we can make generalisations to fit theories and I don't think this is a waste of time at all. ITs always good to have say ten possible profiles of the type of intelligences you could possibly meet to be able to categorise them and their likely capabilities. The only thing we know about them for sure at the moment is they are likely to exist and they don't have any kind of high speed travel technology that we can detect or understand, or maybe like us it just doesn't exist yet, and all they have is theories.