Clifford Simak's "Big Front Yard" of 1959 presupposes that in a universe of abundance, the only reasons to interact with other species are cultural. After all, if it's natural resources you need there are plenty of planets unbeloved by angry natives who don't want their water taken. The example from "big front yard" involves small mouse-like aliens who take a bunch of spare parts from a Yankee trader and pay him back by turning a black'n'white TV in for repair to color. He then discovers their "stargate" for lack of a better term and wanders out into the plains of interstellar commerce where he discovers that while humans have not invented antigravity, apparently we're the first culture to come up with coating things in different-colored pigments for purely aesthetic purposes.

There's a later story from the '80s, the title, author and gist of which I cannot recall, but it was an archetypal "the aliens are among us" story with the argument that duh they're here for the culture. The only thing I do remember was the extremely poignant example of rabbits: the alien in the story explained that any number of races could look at a rabbit and produce any number of reproductions but to date, only one culture has come up with a "wascally wabbit."

If you think back through the history of human exploration, minerals provide a short-term gain, biological specimens a slightly longer gain, but what we've gotten from exploration, over the long term, has been cultural exchange. It's undoubtedly anthropocentric to assume the same about an encounter with other species but really, the one thing we're likely to have that's unique to us is our culture.