From my perspective, you're not identifying an intellectual mistake made by others. You're talking about a difference of values. You don't highly value people being around to observe and participate in the universe, while others care a lot more about this.

What you are saying now is very different from the calculus required to determine if humanities extinction is a catastrophe.

It is one by our point of view, and most humans argue that (a) our point of view is the only one that matters since in the grand aspect we haven’t found any other intelligent point of view, though we theorize they may exist and (b) judging the pain of death as catastrophe is a personal choice, even on Earth we allow people to call the death of their loved ones catastrophic even if other humans continue to go on living blithely unaware of their pain.

Dismissal of the result of some billion years of constant adaptation and struggle is also a mistake, IMO.

We are so much more than bacteria, and until proved otherwise, so far we are the smartest beings in the universe.

We will at some point, stop existing as a species.

This doesn't mean everything we do is meaningless.

Eternity and infinity intelligence are not the only measures we can choose to value ourselves, in fact, they smell too much like religion for my personal taste.

What we have is more struggle, more problems to overcome, more challenges and the possibility of succeeding, the possibility of leaving the solar system before the sun dies and kills the earth.

Step by step. Value the small victories. We have reached very far, so far.

There is so much of this downplaying of humans. We are certainly more than bacteria are any reasonable “scale”. We can create transmissions that reach other galaxies, we can split atoms, and even consider ourselves to be equal to bacteria because we conjure vague notions of incomprehensible advanced species. It’s just a very odd kind of self-deprecation.

Agreed IFF We start with the ‘bloodlines’.

This is horrific - what mechanism would you use to accomplish it?

I would think consciousness, rather than intelligence, is the important component that should persist irrespective of humanity. Intelligence, curiousity, and creativity are important too, but on their own they don't hold moral significance. A universe of computers is not superior to a universe of atoms without something experiencing those abstractions and giving them meaning.