We are not at all post-Copernican, strictly speaking. We value living things like we never did before. You occasionally hear discussion about granting rights to non-human animals: dolphins, apes, etc. That almost never happened in human history (save for a few cultures where certain animals are held to be holy). You are talking about moving away from anthropocentrism, while the scenario I'm describing is a bleak world where all life as such isn't valued. In that world, there isn't even any point of talking about "saving the planet," because "for whom are you saving it for? For polar bears? How are they any better than lifeless rocks: both products of geology?"
For me the respect, and awe, for life comes from how each individual is the proverbial snowflake, as an instance of life, and an incredibly complex, emergent and dynamic one at that.
Take something completely lifeless like a stalactite as a reference. Tehy can take millenniums to form, but the process really isn't very special, just water dripping from the ceiling. Which most people realize, yet most people still feel a certain amount of awe when presented with one, and would be appalled if someone just decided to take it down for no reason. That would be disrespectful.
It's the same thing when we talk about species going extinct. Most of us has no particular connection to most species, and shouldn't be bothered. But still, every species has its own unique character and beauty, which will leave an emptiness behind of possibilities lost, so is a sad thing to loose for that reason alone.
So I think discovering more instance of living things would not make life less valued, on the contrary, more uniqeness would only bring more things to be in awe of.
We will still think of species' as unique (identical biochemistry is exceedingly unlikely), yet life will become somewhat "commodified" in a sense, if you understand that comparison. Obviously, I took some liberty in describing a nightmarish "moral crisis" scenario; I am just surprised that my comment garnered so many responses, all of them misunderstanding my main argument in one way or another.
Finding microbial life through the solar system won't really make us any less special. Even if we find evidence suggesting microbial life is common throughout the universe, it does not imply that complex animal life is common or inevitable. I suspect the goalposts will just be shifted. :)
Only for abrahamic religions. Hinduism/Buddhism and other oriental/ddharmic religions repeatedly downplay our centrality.
As the subject matter is very interesting to me, I started the series with great expectations and positive anticipation. I ended up very disappointed.
To me the overload/tangential style felt essential.
Far too detailed descriptions of landscapes and environment. The first couple of times they are great to read, after that, very boring.
Far too detailed description of politics.
The books could have been half the size and probably would have been better for it.
That wealth of detail was the best part for me. If one wants to be immersed in such a world/scenario, then it is a pleasure. It's much the same as savoring the paeans to nature in the Lord of the Rings trilogy books. There's more to some books than the plot and characterizations.
Eventually there will be life on mars whether it evolved "naturally" there or evolved just as "naturally" some where else and was brought there doesn't matter if it's a rocket or a comet on the cosmological scale both of those processes are just as "natural".
Heck if we find a planet inhabited by self replicating robots they would pretty much automatically count as life, the fact that they aren't made out of some arrangement of self arranging molecules doesn't make it any less "natural" in the grand cosmic scheme.
http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/d/content/ann-clayborne-2
Also some characters begin to spread earth life already in the first book. So if they would find Martian life after this event it could be just mutated Earth life...
After all, even here on Earth we haven't had such a concern for species that are not us. We drove many to extinction even without it being an existential matter for us.
I think the human sense of morality is largely dependent on how similar something is to us, to know if we are even hurting it. How can you hurt a lifeless environment that's the product of random, and sometimes cataclysmic, events?
Of course that would be a real downer of a story.
If we are serious about researching or preserving alien life in our solar system, we would have to be very cautious with what we do. But most likely, economic forces will start to dominate our actions in space, as they have always done on Earth.
Perhaps most advanced intelligence comes in the form of distributed hive minds, and something like a "civilization" is regarded by most sentients as something akin to a pack of wolves or an uncontrolled mob? Maybe we're the ultimate ethical dilemma: All of the bad qualities of a cancer, but you can't ethically kill us because every one of our units is an independent sentience.
Our neighbors are quietly watching us, hoping we'll choke in our own industrial effluents and kill ourselves off in the resulting ecological chaos, so no one has to taint themselves with the unpleasant task of sterilizing our system.
Manufacturing spacecraft capable of traveling between the stars in any reasonable amount of time, if possible at all, would be an immense industrial undertaking, the pinnacle of not just scientific knowledge but societal complexity in order to coordinate the resources involved. Any alien race capable of doing these things must have also committed the sins that they're smugly damning us for, and to a far greater degree than we have.
Starship Troopers.
This only happens because a human being's short lifespan, limited mind, and constricted point of view mans that a human's perceived self-interest is very limited in scope. A planetary scale hive mind could have a much longer lifespan and a (literally) inherently more global view.
Externalities arise because of a limited scope of knowledge, and persist because of self-interests of tiny scope. We think markets are so wonderful, because the distributed computational power of many individuals can keep up with global complexity. What if a single hive mind could command the same number of neurons, without the disparate competing self interests getting in the way?
Note that my comment specifically mentioned hive minds. A civilization has many cooperating/competing individuals. Most of civilization's problems are epiphenomena arising from this fact. What if most galactic factions aren't composed of many individuals, but are effectively one distributed mind? What if they regard our social pathologies as pestilential?
Without giving away too much... there is some tension between scientists trying to use domes and gear to prevent contamination vs. colonists and miners.