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OP: you and many commenters are making some significant assumptions. There's a great short story available online: "The Road Not Taken" by American writer Harry Turtledove that considers how aliens might arrive without more advanced weapons.
I was thinking about that story a lot when all the hype about the room temperature (not) superconductor was going on: Had it been real, it was simple enough that we could have discovered it a couple centuries sooner and who knows what our technology would be like.
And it's a stretch, but it's good to point out that there's a lot of edge cases to consider. Even human big history is mostly open questions.