A good point, Gary. As much as I am interested in extraterrestrial life, I also find the worlds and star systems (including galaxies and their clusters) to be just as fascinating, and at least not just hypothetical.

In fact I can recall my unhappiness at the general reaction to the Viking landers not seeming to find definitive life on Mars in the late 1970s. It was as if because they didn't that the missions were failures.

I would hardly call the first two truly successful landers on the Red Planet returning thousands of amazing images for years, monitoring the weather on an alien world, and returing the first data on the planet's geology a failure. The fact that life was not readily evident on Mars should have been heralded as an interesting discovery in itself.

So while I will always want to know if life could exist on the new exoworlds we keep finding, and hope that someday some form of SETI will be successful, I also think we should find joy, knowledge, and amazement at the tangible Universe around us.