Discovering that our planet is not a special snowflake would be one of the most inspirational experiences I can dream of.
Discovering intelligent life, end more so!
Discovering super-intelligent life - think of the possibilities!
Then nearly every sci-fi movie flashes before my eyes, and I wonder: would they be as amazed at our presence in the universe? Or a pest, dirtying up a rocky ball of perfectly harvestable resources they intend to process for their alien armada?
To each their own. Finding unique pond scum on Mars would deeply horrify me.
If life independently emerged twice in one system then the paucity of intelligent life's cosmic signature means something happens between formation and broadcast with deafening regularity.
This is what scares me. The universe follows long time horizons. It's unlikely that we'd find someone just +/- 10,000 years of us. It would more likely be much more advanced, or much less. And if they were much more advanced, they'd find us first. And that rarely ends well for the less developed species. We eat cows, and have vaccines for bacteria.
Given how rapidly VR, remote work/telepresence, and so on is advancing, it's plausible that a civilization slightly more advanced than us won't even physically travel their bodies anymore, or potentially not even use biological bodies at some point, resulting in difficulty detecting any sort of industrial emission or spectrum from the planet.
HabEx is a mission in the planning stage for precisely this purpose: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/habex/. It's one of the four upcoming candidates for a post-JWST flagship space telescope.
People can keep looking for them in exoplanets, but they won't dig those any time soon either. Those are two very different goals that just share the name of "finding ET life".