My unprovable assumption is that only beings who value knowledge and cooperation highly enough will get to the point of crossing the difficult technological threshold of achieving singularity or space travel. I think the more likely Achilles heel for my scenario is sexual selection - the trap that perpetuates selfish behavior in both sexes even when there is no resource scarcity. Even in this, humans at least are sometimes able to escape the trap by being meta enough to see kindness as strength and beauty. I think the fastest, and most likely first, route to our singularity will start with reverse engineering one human mind, and I will hold onto hope that that mind will hear the call of light, and the truth and beauty feedback loop will be unstoppable. It helps that I also believe that as information increases, morality converges on a process for maximizing the long term preservation of information (where on this planet, human minds are the most information dense and therefore the most valuable things we can preserve). /end sci fi sermon
An anthill-like species can value cooperation among themselves without necessarily valuing knowledge for knowledge's sake - imagine the Hive Queens from Ender's Game, or MorningLightMountain.
That's making a lot of assumptions about alien psychology, believing they're going to have the same goals as us. Why not
1. Propagation of your species, forever
2. Expansion of your territory until the entire Universe is yours
3. Endless pursuit of pleasure
4. Propagating religious beliefs, or something we'd recognize as such.
5. Escaping this Universe, which will eventually end.