It's sometimes fun to think that technology is a function of the intelligence that creates it.
What if the aliens have some vastly different perception of reality than us? Things we consider obvious to them may not be, and vice versa. The underlying desires and motivation different.
Humans for example, often tend to invent things for the sake of it. Imagine a species that doesn't do that. Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird.
E.g., What if the first aliens to find us are hyperintelligent slime molds, whose entire existence is predicated on finding the shortest distance between two points in higher-dimensional space and then traveling there to see what there is to eat?
Here squids evolved into a spacefaring race that is, if at all, only using organic technology and doesn't seem to have consciousness.
They are at war with the spacefaring humans that rely on mecha and AI. It ends with a very non-human and frustrating coexistence message instead of going for all out termination of hostile creatures.
We may shift to computers that operate off of chemical signals instead of electrical ones - like the brain.
We didn't install supercomputers in the Space Shuttle either. All the big iron was in a building on the ground.
Why would it thus be so difficult to imagine there being some spring or treatment that could effectively end illness or even aging? A fountain of youth just awaiting its discovery. It was little more than a normal continuation outward from a process of exponential progress. But of course the exponential progress came to an unexpected end, and consequently the predictions made now look simply naive or superstitious.
We're now currently in our own period of exponential discovery and the fabulous tales of achievements to come are anything but scarce. Of course, this time it'll be different.
Perhaps they operate a combination of biological systems alongside their electro mechanical ones.
Their ship may be locally intelligent everywhere, with that all rolling up to an i9 ish main control system.
Purpose optimized hardware communicating along standardized interconnects could mean lot of hard tasks done in silicon or shared with biological systems too.
They may have decades, centuries old solutions to many hard problems boiled down to heuristics able to run in near time today.
just thousands? I would expect 100k years at a minimum and even that is only .0007% of the age of the universe. Millions or Billions of years more advanced is not out of the question.
It would be interesting to see how similar technology is among such advanced civilizations, even if they did not compare notes. Does technology eventually converge to the same optimal devices in each civilization?
Given our current extremely primitive state (only about a hundred years of useful electronics) I would be disappointed if we could even imagine what this technology looks like.