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

When you lose your car keys, do you travel to the Antarctic to look in the Antarctic permafrost and scour every inch of the planet to find them? Or do you look in the places you were most likely to lose your keys?

Searching for life is like that. We are aware that life could’ve come about in many different ways. But our only example is Earth life. Space is really big, so we are prioritising looking for hallmarks of Earth, because that’s a scenario we’re 100% sure could possibly make life. We know that because we are that life. We could try scouring every inch of space, but that would take so long that we could miss Earth-like carbon based life in the time we were searching for silicon-based life under the 248 millionth rock on the moon.

Additionally, we don’t really know what non Earth-like carbon based life might look like. When you’re looking for your car keys, you have an idea of what that looks like. Roughly car key shaped. Knowing what a thing looks like and where it likely could be makes finding it far easier.

In other news, I’ve lost my keys.