We see no other life, we have spaceships, and it’s not guaranteed that we will have spaceships indefinitely. Our priority, our responsibility to the non-space-

We see no other life, we have spaceships, and it’s not guaranteed that we will have spaceships indefinitely. Our priority, our responsibility to the non-space-faring life forms of Earth is to spread them, as much as possible, to as many places as possible. Drop them into Venus, Mars, Europa, onto every passing comet, and as soon as it becomes feasible, into a one way trip to the nearest exoplanets. It’s bad enough that the universe appears to have no other life in it, we are the only known agents with any chance of changing that, it’s way more important for the next 14 billion years that we try, than that we protect our ability to identify some hypothetical Martian protein chains or amoebae.