Or just engineering some. Biological organisms seem overly tuned to their environment and complex ones need a supporting biological ecosystem to thrive (so far that we've seen). It may be more effective to get robotics to our level and expand intelligence into the galaxy 'synthetically'.
The line between "biological" and "synthetic" is blurry and gets blurrier all the time. You can (and probably should) see biology as super advanced tech. One of the primary benefits is self-replication - ability for components to consume various resources and build copies of themselves. This is huge, and it enables everything from self-regenerating materials to in-situ upgrades. 3D printing is a joke compared to that. So while maybe Earth organisms are a bit over-tuned (on the macro scale) to planet's environment, we'd do good to treat life as superior nanotech we don't control yet, and not some kind of joke that can be replaced with steel and silicon (not that you said that; it's just a point of view I often see on the Internet).
I don't get why more people don't think this way.
Humans as they are today will probably never be able to thrive in space or even on other planets similar to earth, that is without a lot of genetic engineering or something of that sort.
Create intelligent self replicating machines and a large part of the problems related to space travel just disappear.
If creating an AGI is possible I would be surprised if the universe isn't already full of artificial life.
once you've gotten to the tech level where you can artificially engineer a lifeform advanced enough to do something useful, but hardy enough to survive venus-
by that point I'd say the distinction between robot and organism would be pretty blurry. ;-)
Or just engineering some. Biological organisms seem overly tuned to their environment and complex ones need a supporting biological ecosystem to thrive (so far that we've seen). It may be more effective to get robotics to our level and expand intelligence into the galaxy 'synthetically'.