As we don't really have adequate definitions for the word "life" the quest must necessarily be rather ambiguous. In reality, what we're doing is looking for traces of gas we believe may be the consequence of biological activity of some sort. But as many of these traces can also be produced by geothermal events (for example) there will likely be no totally unambiguous data. Secondly, while personally I suspect primitive unicellular life of various kinds is quite prevalent on a minority of planets, this is not at all the same thing as imagining Star Trek aliens whizzing around in SpaceX version 201.1 craft magically transgressing basic physics. Remember, we had life on Earth for at least 3 billion years before eukaryotes began to make their mark - the cyanobacteria were dominant for a huge portion of that time (and slowly poisoned themselves by excreting the highly toxic by-product O2). If we are very, very lucky we'll find some sort of reasonably firm data that may indicate there's some biological activity somewhere, but most people will fail to understand it, just as they fail to understand everything else around them. A few will squeal excitedly about Star Trek fantasies. But "reaching out" to bacteria is too funny an idea to entertain for longer than it takes to choke on one's morning coffee. As for intelligent life "out there" we have yet to discover any on Earth....