Reaction to extra-terrestial life.

[Anomalocaris]

I do, sure. I even see them building structures, etc, and I relate to that. Doesn't stop me from annihilating them - but if I tooled in my microscope and found a tiny microbial bicycle...yeah, I'd give them a little more thought (before annihilating them). I think the relationship of ourselves to bacteria doesn't really address what we're talking about. We'd both (in the case of another tech species, however advanced) be tinkerers, the builders of things. Hopefully said tinkerers aren't as aggressive as myself or yourself.

How would you feel about bacteria that built a handaxe?

I think you feel this way because on the scale of biological development, we are still so very close, maybe 1 million years, to the most primitive technology possible, the hand axe, that we naturally feel kinship to a handaxe maker. The bond is further strengthened because we are still compelled to use tools little different from hand axe from time to time. To us the first tool maker, the possessor of the first technology, may not be wholly human, but was already mostly human, and tool making distinguishes us, humans, from them, animals. Some minor exceptions aside. We sit on the tip of one small branch of a big evolutionary tree, and it just so happens all the tool makers share our branch.

Now imagine a creature that is at the end of an evolutionary tree that has passed 3 billion years beyond the first hand axe. It seems very likely that in those three billion years, the clan of tool makers have not only advanced greatly beyond our wildest imagination in tool use and would have no use whatsoever for a hand axes, but also speciated many, many times in the course of 3 billion years. A technological species 3 billion years more advanced then we would likely not sit on a lone branch of tool makers in a tree of non tool makers. Instead, after 3 billion years it would likely represent but the highest branch on a entire evolutionary tree of mostly different tool makers. Most may have gone extinct in the 3 billion years, but 3 billion years would allow the most advanced tool maker to the morphologically and behaviorally, to say nothing of technologically, so vastly different from other tool makers that have come and went in the 3 billion years, as different as we and bacteria, that it seems hard to imagine they would still identify mere primitive tool making as an significant mark of kinship.

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Agree with the logic but I don't believe we have ever hopped before.
I think it is what it is.

If we ever manage to hop, it'll be the first time.

We have not hopped before. But I find it astronomically unlikely that no one has hopped before.

The following fact further increase the odds, beyond a simple naive numbers extrapolation, that someone has hopped before is:

The planets in the universe, the ones on which life would have had the longest time in which to evolve technology, mostly likely formed in environments where stars are far more closely bunched together, in globular clusters, and in the central bulges of baby galaxies, than around the sun. From these planets interstellar hop would have been easier, and less time consuming, than it would be for us.

So those life that had the longest to perfect the technology for space travel are also likely to have evolved on worlds where nearby stars are closer and interstellar travel therefore easier.