Regarding 1: True, but I don't mean the origin of life is necessarily easy. I mean it's hard to fathom the universe being so finely tuned as to make life happen once and only once. If it's easy, then the universe is probably teaming with life. If it's hard, then probably there are scattered instances of life. But one and only one instance? That suggests very fine fine tuning.

Regarding 2: We can't assume that technological advancement can occur without limit. Communication in our universe is limited by the speed of light. (As I understand it, even quantum entanglement doesn't allow true FTL transmission of information.) So we're stuck with taking an extremely long time to get to all but the nearest stars and transmit back data. Even if we get close to light speed, most of the 1,800 stars we could reach and return data from within a century (those within 50 LY) are red dwarfs. Only a little over 130 are not.

I can see us going farther on a limited scale, but what's the point of launching projects that won't be complete for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years? I could be wrong, but I doubt advancements in technology will ever change that time scale.

Yes, Douglas Adams had Deep Thought think for 7.5 million years before it came up with the answer 42, then it needed to build another computer which would take another 10 million years to find the explanation for the answer. (And it was destroyed right before it spit out the answer.) But that was a joke. Nobody in their right minds would invest in a project of that duration.