Mmmmm, forbidden garlic.

laughs in Haliburton

If you're an interstellar species there's no reason to wipe out another preemptively. There's just so much room that there's nothing they would have in their tiny sphere of control that you couldn't get elsewhere. An interstellar civilization like that would be post-scarcity, and they would be more interested in talking than destroying.

But let's change the scenario and say there's a whole community of interstellar civilizations that are much older and shared their "warp" tech with others. Perhaps they're much closer to each other like near Sag A*. If more civs have access to this tech sooner then they may have not worked out their primal tendencies and be much more warlike.

Truth is we're in a pretty safe neighborhood of the galaxy. It's more like the stix, and we're a tiny tribe that you can't even hear deep in the jungle. Hell, some explorers may have passed a few hundred light years from us prospecting and neither of us would ever know.

And they don't look back cause they don't have necks, necks are for sheep.

Always look on the bright side of death...