What are humans looking for when it's about exploring space?
Adam, Nick, LJK raise the question.
We're after another world like Earth, we're after life elsewhere in the Universe, we're even after intelligent life elsewhere, we're after beings we can communicate with. Or at least, that's what the scientific community is telling us and that's what the public wants to find.
But we've learned (with the Voyager probes, the exoplanets) the more we find, the stranger it becomes. The universe shows more and more variety and chances to find something like us become more and more remote.
That's the fun, discovering the unexpected, trying to interpret what we find and later, discovering those interpretations were yet again wrapped with anthropocentrism, and correcting them again.

Perhaps we can't ever find extra-terrestrial intelligence, but the search is what makes it interesting. Because searching is what makes us asking questions. The discovery settles things, but it's the next questions that make it exciting.
And why the ETI search, after all? Because we need somebody to communicate with? But that somebody, who must it be?
We communicate with animals even though we don't talk the same language; geologists communicate with rocks as they have something those scientists understand. Astronomers communicate with stars which have proprieties astronomers have hints about and those scientists can even guess future events coming from them.
But the universe is so rich in its variety. That's what the public should understand. Ok, the problem is to try to explain difficult scientific facts while Little Green Men with large bug eyes is so more attractive as the proverbial ET.
That's where we come forward, trying to explain why it's interesting when there's no life as we know it, why it's interesting when it doesn't directly affect our lives. It also depends on how we communicate to the public.

Raoul