Well, even if we're not alone, we must acknowledge that someone had to be first to develop the ability to travel through the cosmos. It may actually be us.
We already have that ability. It's just that this travel is insanely slow and requires the energy levels that we can't easily produce in those timescales. It is quite possible (I would even say likely) that any faster travel is not very viable, and it might never be possible to make any kind of FTL engine.
I'd like to think it's at least possible that a life form which made it to the stars without blowing itself up is compassionate enough to leave Earth the heck alone and treat this system as a giant nature reserve. Perhaps they'll swoop in and borrow our tech if we ever come up with anything good, just as we might draw on the natural world for new medicines or construction materials.
And yet, over time, humanity has trended to respecting the life of all sentient creatures. It seems like in the limit, especially if scarcity of resources is eliminated, all life will be precious and valued.
I just googled for how many lab animals are used in reseach in the US, and the number was ~800K in 2017. But (and this is a big but) rats and mice (and birds and fish) are not counted. For some reason, guinea pigs and hamsters are considered more equal than rats and mice.
One supplier of lab mice in Maine provides ~3 million mice per year...
Yearly production (and slaughter) of chickens is something like 60+ billion. Not sure if sentient, but perhaps they deserve it as descendants of the dinosaurs that terrorized human ancestors...
