What do we do if SETI is successful?

In the end, I kinda... don't care. Look up - there's nothing. There should be at least some alien civilizations trying to make their presence known. There should be some signs somewhere that could be recognized universally as either "stay away" or "come here". It really should be trivial to locate technological civilizations unless you've got some incredibly solid reason as to why EVERY SINGLE ALIEN CIVILIZATION IN THE UNIVERSE acts a certain way. Color me doubtful.

We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty. We have exactly one (1) data point showing it isn't. And that's us.

Besides, just look at the timeline. The universe has only been cool enough, with enough stable stars, with enough formed planets for potential life to form for a few billion years. Between that and the Drake equation, life alone is likely to be unreasonably uncommon. Life that forms after a planet becomes stable, doesn't have any planet-altering disasters, evolves to complex multicellular forms, evolves some kind of intelligence, becomes social, forms a society, advances technology, and starts exploring the universe...? Why bother? The math doesn't work.

Note: I'm not speaking about any KIND of life existing, I'm speaking about technological civilizations. My belief is that we are essentially the forerunners.

When you look up remember that the majority of what you see is in the same sub-arm of the spiral arm of the milky way that we are in. Of those we can see a large number or binary systems - two stars orbiting each other. We fancy telescopes we can see a lot more of course.

All the power of stars, and most of them still are not powerful enough that we can see them even on a dark night! What chance does any alien have of sending a message that reaches us if the light from their star isn't even powerful enough to be easy to detect? It was suggested elsewhere that even if we find an alien, we probably cannot respond if they are more than 100 light years away just because we can't get a message out powerful enough that they can detect (I can't verify this claim but it is reasonable)