Bacteria don't want to explore, they float around, and occasionally do gradient climbing to navigate to good chemicals. That's an example of a pro-survival technique that works very well, but is not going to lead to anything better. Every living thing on Earth except for people is an example of a living thing with some degree of intelligence, or at least beneficial control, but that does not have scientific progress.
Amoebas can propel themselves, and if you drop them in one corner of a lake, I can guarantee you that they will explore it to find food and reproduce.
Bacteria don't have scientific progress, but because they reproduce rapidly, they also evolve very fast compared to us. Some of them can even exchange genetic material with each other (!). This is a way for them to exchange "knowledge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilus).
I can guarantee you that if you observed amoebas under a microscope for a while, you would realize that these are more sophisticated little machines than you think.
> "largest genomes belongs to a very small creature, Amoeba dubia. This protozoan genome has 670 billion units of DNA, or base pairs. The genome of a cousin, Amoeba proteus, has a mere 290 billion base pairs, making it 100 times larger than the human genome."
