I don't really know if its possible to go through life without harming life as small as that. There's a religion where they try, Jainism. They will literally avoid eating food that's stored overnight, because it has higher concentrations of microorganisms. But even they acknowledge its impossible to entirely avoid causing harm, and only seek to minimize it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

Assuming you’re not a haywire LLM, if you’re alive and posting here, you eat. If you eat, you’ve already internalized and practiced the notion that it’s acceptable to kill other life forms to stay alive.

The study of biology also serves to keep people alive; our modern practice of medicine evolved from the understanding gained by scientists, studying in the name of science.

It's a microbial goop, as far as ethics go I'm not sure you can really do better. Eating plants is probably more ethically questionable

The point is the scientist didn't know it was until after blowtorching it.

It was obviously a goop before he did that. Do you think there was a chance the goop would leap up like the thing? He was probably seeing if it was oil

And this is how the hyper-intelligent race of ShipGoo0001 beings decided humans were an existential threat.

I'm just glad they got it before it bit anyone's arms off

Won't someone think of the prokaryotes!