Projects like active SETi which are trying to make contact with intelligent non-terrestial life seem a bit dangerous and I think they should be outlawed to be perfectly blunt. Its a huge huge assumption that alien life would be interested in scientific discovery or whatever and they could just as likely be malevolent (kinda like the Combine from Half Life 2 or something TLDR : Systematically turn humanity into will-less cyborgs for its military and strip the planet of its resources)
Then you have to consider that humanity isn't exactly at peace with itself, people are still killing each other over things like what form of theology is right, racial supremacy, being part of a minority or just being different. How can a species at war with itself possibly have proper relations with another (assuming the other species is not malevolent)
IMO we should be trying to avoid sending transmissions into space ( I have no idea how though) or something
SETI is more about listening than speaking it turns out that virtually all of our radio broadcasts from back in the day blends into background white noise in a couple of light-years of distance. You know, square cube law. Basically, if aliens aren't literally on our doorstep there's no chance SETI will do anything, but SETI projects improve our understanding of space and telecommunications. So, even if SETI has a 0% chance of discovering intelligent alien life it's still worth investing some stuff into.
I don't think that's it's possible or desirable to stop fighting amongst ourselves before we know whether or not we need to be fighting them. Why should we turn ourselves into peaceful, enlightened versions of ourselves and allow military skills and technology to atrophy in the long peace when we need it to fight that one in a hundred hostile alien race? As long as we keep ourselves together enough to not ally with the hostile aliens against other humans we'd be best off.
Can you define what "proper relations" even are? We can get along pretty easy. All we need is something to do. We stir up trouble and get caught up on things that don't really matter when we don't have something grand to accomplish. It'd be super easy for aliens to keep us peaceful (towards them) by giving us a foe to defeat and a great task to accomplish.
I think that if we were located in the ass end of nowhere galaxy wise that might have happened already.