I guess you haven't been reading the room lately. In the modern retelling, the explorers that found the "New World" produced only net negatives and we'd have been all much better off had they stayed in western europe.
In the end humans are naturally curious, expansionist, greedy (to varying degrees). We've always been this way and so it's only natural for us to continue.
We've been described as a virus before, feels relatively accurate esp if we start planet and system hopping.
Why is it so difficult to just accept that a single person can have both inspiration qualities that we should try to emulate and also grave moral failings we should learn from? No one is perfect and hardly anyone is purely evil either.