Prez wrote on Sep 13, 2024, 15:24:
As you could read in my signature, I consider ALL life precious. Personally I value a dog's life, a cat's life, a bear, a wolf, or a falcon, all equally precious. I don't think that is egotistical. Organic life is exceedingly rare in an immense universe, making what there is extremely precious in my view.

That is an assumption without facts in evidence. We don't know, definitively, that organic life is rare in our own galaxy, let alone the entire universe. For that matter, we haven't even comprehensively explored our own solar system so there could be thermophilic lifeforms that exist in abundance on planets within the Sol system. All we have are theories based on the extremely minuscule amount of understanding we have gleaned in the last hundred years.

For all we know, organic life could be as plentiful as hydrogen in our local cluster.

But to narrow the scope, organic life isn't rare even on our own planet. There are 2.16 million individual species that we have named. Just named. There almost certainly many more in areas and environments that we can't reach yet and haven't discovered yet. 2.16 million species is pretty hard to describe as "rare".