Ah, but what's a few thousand years to a self-repairing AI? And you assume the data being sent back is meant for humans on Earth. By the time interstellar travel really gets going, the reason for exploring other star systems may have other goals in mind.

I'm glad we can debate this issue without getting cro-magnon. :^) I certainly recognize your points and they are not trivial.

It took me a while to get out of that space/SETI paradigm I and most others had growing up, especially in the good old Apollo days when humans colonising the Sol system was just a few decades away.

Few in the early 1960s could think of space exploration and beings of other worlds as anything other than being biological. Computers were still big, dumb monsters cranking out numbers. And they were still struggling with the acceptance in the mainstream science community for the mere idea of alien life, let alone trying to figure out its evolutionary trends.

Perhaps in another 50 years there will be other paradigms and our descendants will wonder how we could be so short-sighted. Of course they will all be AIs pondering this while reshaping the Milky Way galaxy into an immense art form to impress the AI of other galaxies. :^)