I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology.
If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets.
No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.
Unless there's no one.
The rest of us would never know and just go on wondering "where is everybody".
The problem with the assumption is that our sample-size, as far as our species is concerned, is one. The very concept of society may not exist for an alien that is a single collective intelligence or for one that has simply developed a very advanced set of instinctual responses without higher-level thought.
We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them.
And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers.
No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc.
The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.)
So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by.
Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely.
But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place.
The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves.
[1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.