If your goal is to spread life around the galaxy, humans are terrible species to try to do it with.

Wouldn't it be much easier to just create extremophile/tardigrade factories that just constantly produce them and chuck them in random directions?

Perhaps some wise aliens already did so, and we are the offspring.

I'm more pessimistic about the politics than the tech. While there's huge issues going from e.g. current nuclear arsenal to a working Orion drive, that's at least plausible; the idea humans can be in a tin can for a century without ending up with enough people who think "'the outside is a deadly vacuum' is just a conspiracy" for one of them to cut a hole in the wall, is where I think there's no line of sight to a real solution.

We had a pandemic for just a few years and people were treating boring minimal PPE used by every dentist and surgeon for decades as some secret ploy for control.

We, as a species, are not yet ready for large-scale life off Earth; not even within our own system.

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