[elihu]

Most ants are benign. Some ants will eat your house. We have the technological capacity to make our own planet uninhabitable to humans and perhaps to any kind of life if we tried hard enough. We could probably do pretty nasty things to planets in other star systems if we were sufficiently motivated to do so and weren't in any great hurry.

An advanced alien civilization might see us not as threatening per se but rather as a potential problem they have to manage somehow and not just ignore.