Life on other planets will be a let down

I realized today that if we ever discover life on other planets, initially it will be a serious let down. There's not going to be a moment of serious excitement, but rather a very long series of small steps.

The most likely way to find life on another planet is to find something like bacteria. Which to some scientists will be really exciting, but overall - whoo hoo - bacteria. Plus it will be really hard to prove that it didn't just get put there by coming in contact with the person or robot that found it. Heck there was that thing with the asteroid or whatever a long time ago and it was sorta big news for a while and now I can't even remember the story.

But let's say we actually discover intelligent life, which I think is what most people mean when they talk about discovering life. I think we've explored our solar system enough to know we're not going to find anything too interesting here. So one possibility is we'll get some questionable photo from a satellite which will then have to be followed up by another satellite that will take a really long time to get there. Once it gets there it could get exciting, but we're probably talking years if not decades. And that's probably just to get more pictures.

If the life we find is technologically advanced the other reasonably likely possibility is we would find a communication from them, may or may not be directed to us, long before we found them. Would probably be found by something like SETI. So we'd find an odd radiation pattern. Then over a long time it would be confirmed - have to make sure it was computed properly and check that it is persistent and not caused by human activity. Even if it said something interesting it would take a long time to figure out what it says. Or it could just be the spectrum from something like a power plant rather than a communication. Anyway, that's all years right there, then figuring out a way to send a signal and them catching on and so on would be a really long time. So maybe at some point regular communication could be set up which would be exciting, although travel to them would probably be decades if not centuries away.

I have no idea why this occurred to me today. At first it just sounded like a silly idea, but now I'm actually kind of bummed out.