You had me at weird cheeses. On a serious note, that was a great article. One of my biggest worries with the prospect of humanity exploring the rest of the galaxy and the universe is that we will accidentally destroy something that we didn't even know was there. We are looking for things like those on Earth, but those things evolved on Earth. We may not even recognize life or its signs when we see it (from afar). I can see this devolving in an industrious resource grab, but I have hope that we may learn from the colonization of "the New World" and our behavior as a whole during that time. I really hope we approach this in the right way. I may not live to see it, but it's about to be an (even more) exciting time to be alive.
I can definitely agree with you about humanity's expansion becoming a resource grab, but it could also be that we become the resources for a more advanced civilisation. Either way it's gonna be pretty tricky to get right.