Why are the conditions for alien life to evolve the same as ours? Why can’t they evolve without water, or extremely far from their sun? Is there a reason for this or is it just because our only example is ourselves?

Question

Idk if to put biology or planetary science so ye.

In: Biology

Answer 1

They don’t have to. But doing things in real life isn’t a computer game. You don’t have a button that says “tell me everything about this”. Every question asked has to be specific “is there oxygen?”, “is there CO2”, “is there carbon?” etc all come with an associated cost and time. Each detector might use a different telescope. Each telescope and the associated equipment costs millions of dollars. Every question asked needs someone, ultimately, to analyze the data collected.

Given finite resources, finite time and finite knowledge, and not living in a computer game, real life research requires a narrowing of search criteria and to focus on “most likely candidates”. People can have differences in what they consider “most likely” but they too need to get approval to use the resource needed to search using their own ideas.

If someone said “life is most likely pink unicorns made out of cake and pooping out diamonds”, they’d probably not get anyone to agree to use valuable search resources based on this criteria.