What dictates that extra terrestrial life requires water in the same way as we do? Even on earth we have fish who can’t live in the open air, and people who can’t live underwater.
What is to say that ET can’t eat space rocks to obtain all of its nutrients, or even more, what is to say that they require nutrients at all?
Edit: Thanks for all the wonderful answers. Makes perfect sense. They aren’t so much saying we HAVE to have water to create life, more that we only know how that works and looking for the unknown in the vast expanse that is the universe would be the worlds largest needle in a haystack game.
In: Planetary Science
What else are we going to look for then? Look, we know that water is necessary and fundamental to life as we understand it. We also know that water is fairly abundant (surprisingly so), and we know what it looks like when viewed from light years away. So it’s our “low-hanging fruit” and since we cannot look at everything all the time, we’ve reasonably chosen to pick the low-hanging fruit first. At some point, maybe we can expand our search if we learn some new physics things that lead us to believe non-water environments can support life, but for now, we’re using our limited resources to look at what is our current best guess when it comes to a potential for life.
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