Let's start with Artificial Intelligence. The mouse brain has been simulated, albeit very schematically. Our children will get comfortable with expert systems operating highway traffic and trains, as well as medical procedures. The latter is already in place, since no surgeon actively guides the laser cutting your cornea for LASIK.

Transplants will yield to custom-grown tissue, perhaps in generic non-allergenic form, but certainly personalized tissue will become available for skin and organ replacement.

Lifespan will increase, first for the wealthy. It may mean functional immortality. 

The first steps to exploiting solar system resources will occur within 50 yrs or less.

Florida will shrink.

Animals, both domestic and wild, will be given intelligence-enhancing treatments, for purposes such as security and exploration/rescue.

The first space habitats will be launched, once again first for the wealthy, but followed by groups seeking freedom to follow unusual social systems, like religious devotees.

The experiments for all the above are underway, and if there's money in it, it will happen.

So we finally have a candidate planet with a chance for liquid surface water. About as nearby as we could reasonably expect, at 20.5 light-years it is in our neighborhood, not in another spiral arm of the galaxy.

Likely its star was born in the same starbirth epoch as our own, so if there's life it's been evolving for a similar time. Possibly longer if the system settled down faster, given its smaller star. What is needed for further information is a space-borne scope that can resolve a faint planet next to a bright star, not possible with Hubble's aperture. Whenever that is built, or some clever technique is developed for earthly instruments, we will read the spectrum of the atmosphere.

If there is oxygen, there is life, end of story. This because oxygen is not a stable component of an atmosphere--it would rapidly react to other elements or chemicals. We only have such an atmosphere because of plants and photosynthetic bacteria.

Worth thinking about the reverse situation--if there were other civilizations, they would likely survey their neighborhood as we do, and our atmosphere is a huge green flag: "Life Here!" For now, that is.

When someone says it doesn't matter since we'll never go to Gliese 581, inform them that it is quite possible with current technology. The physicist Robert Forward porposed a design for the "starwisp", which consists of a spiderweb of thin wires, and incorporates imaging chips at the junctions. It would be propelled by a microwave laser (maser), taking about a week to accelerate its 100 lbs to nearly lightspeed. We'd have a return transmission, with images, in about 50 yrs. 

A long time, but a similar mission to the Centauri system, at 4+ light-years, would yield results in about ten years, the same as our current outer-planet missions.