No, that’s the point. The single-celled prokaryote has strengths you don’t, like needing a vastly lesser amount of energy to survive and reproduce. It doesn’t need to go through all the complicated ‘must find a mate’ rigmarole, either. It just grows, replicates, and divides, and sometimes it smooshes itself up against another prokaryote, and the two of them trade genetic information, and then separate again to go on their merry way.
No, you don’t, because you exist in a wider variety of environments simultaneously than it does. You’re on the surface of something, you say… but you’re existing within a range of pressures, humidities, temperatures, air motions… not necessarily a wide range, by our standards, but by the standards of that prokaryote? I’m fairly certain that the surface it’s living on, and the air around your head, differ immensely as far as it’s concerned. Especially if it lives in a puddle.
Or, you know, is everything that lives in water an extremophile?
But you have a much greater set of needs, both in terms of complexity and in terms of sheer quantity. It doesn’t need all the crap you do. It doesn’t need clothes, it doesn’t need as many calories, it might not need oxygen at all… heck, it might need an anaerobic environment,
But since you brought up ‘extremophiles’… How many worlds out there are actively used to harvest microbes, but are way outside of the window of human habitability, either because of gravity, or temperature, or what have you? I know my own employees run operations on at least 20. Meanwhile, the worlds we live on, we live inside carefully-controlled artificial environments, or we’ve terraformed… and most of them, not exactly all that well. Athra, Gallente Prime, Matar, New Caldari Prime, a few others… heck, Caldari Prime (original recipe) is just barely habitable. Frankly, the idea that you’d marginalize them as ‘extremophiles’ is kinda funny. The truth is more that we’re fragile little hothouse flowers.
As an example, just look at the surface pressures listed for the 4 temperate planets in the Rens systems.
Rens II: ‘Low’.
Rens III: ‘Very Low’.
Rens V: 13.23 kPa
Rens VI: 290.45 kPa
Now, I don’t know exactly what ‘Low’ and ‘Very Low’ mean, but clearly, they’re not at the ‘we’re able to measure this in kiloPascals’ range, because the other two are measured in kPa, so there must be a reason they’re not.
1 standard atmosphere, the way every station in New Eden is pressurized to, is roughly 101 kPa. So even if we say ‘Low’ and ‘Very Low’ are just ‘we’re too lazy to tell you’, then Rens V and Rens VI are both worlds where microbes can be harvested, but human life can’t just go stretching out on the beach in a bikini.
To say nothing of Rens V having an average temp of 314k, and Rens VI at 306, which are about 30 and 20 kelvin higher than a comfortable range for most of the planet. Rens V is mostly water, so that’d be a really, really rainy place and probably dealing with a lot of storms, while VI has a huge-ass continent, so that’s a whole lotta very, very dry interior… neither one is especially conducive to our form of life, but the microbes seem to love it!