Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy explores this problem pretty strongly in the last book (Death's End), and also foreshadows it a bit in the first two. I recently binge-read them all and I give a very high recommendation for them. Calling the guy "China's Clarke" may not be a stretch.

I mentioned it down-thread, but my favorite part of the trilogy is his answer to the Fermi paradox (minor spoilers ahead): because of the universal limit of light speed, and exponential growth in technology, by the time you see evidence of advanced alien life, chances are they have developed to the point of being an existential threat to your own civilization. So the only logical behavior is to remain hidden and immediately destroy any civilization you detect. I haven't heard anyone propose this particular solution before, so I thought it was quite clever.

It might be overselling Arthur C. Clarke, who is largely known for strange stuff like 2001. Three body has a much more salient blend of pure hard sci fi and human drama. Maybe an Orson Scott Card? It is kind of a newer style.

Pohl's "Heechee Saga" books (”Gateway" and its sequels) end up with humans getting involved in wars between a couple different God-Like Ancient Aliens who wanted to change various cosmological constants in ways that would make intelligent life more or less likely to happen.

They don't show up until like book 3 of the series though.

The Xeelee Sequence of books addresses similar ideas, except I'd argue that the Xeelee and the Photino Birds are several orders of magnitude above the Heechee and The Foe.

After reading this article I was reminded of Isaac Asimov's short story "The Last Question".

http://multivax.com/last_question.html

If you are looking for fiction, Lem's Solaris is good exploration "too alien" concept.

Both. It feels as though both could offer interesting perspectives on alien intelligence. Since there's so much we don't know, I assume many theories would be labeled as fiction to be proven otherwise.

Lem's His Master's Voice is also in the same genre, but the section A New Cosmology from A Perfect Vacuum is much more specifically about this topic.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the comments section of the article.

Not really a book but I recently stumbled across a Korean drama on Hulu, called "W" that I thought was pretty thought provoking in this type of train of thought, IMO.

"Diaspora" by Greg Egan explores a few concepts like this.