Sure, alien high tech is alien... you cannot appreciate ICs without microscopes, nor custom-designed organisms without solid understanding of biology, nor poetry without language and culture.

But I think some things are always common - such as not dying from hunger, predators or bad weather. If something as simple as bad weather can cause species to die, _and_ we know there a really simple workaround (houses), and yet there is no sign of it and species just keep dying, can we really call them "intelligent"?