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
Carbon has a cool property that it likes to make big fun and complex molecules (atoms that stick together because they have shared interests), and water is a good place to do that – we’re pretty sure that’s where life on our planet came from, we already have 1 planet we can make this assumption from (earth), so we assume other places might also come to a similar path if they have the same bits present for long enough
so we look for places with water and carbon, because water is a good solvent (stuff mixes up in it) and carbon being mixed and mashed with stuff could lead to a similar little proteins/molecules that form the stuff that eventually made the first little grumblers in our oceans
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