Comment Re:Life (Score 2) 117
But let us reword your position for a moment to point out the folly (currently at least) in its usefulness.
Here in my home country, if I desired a hamburger I happen to know from experience that most restaurants will have such a thing to sell to me. Ignoring jokes about McDonalds not having real food for just a moment, I know they are the most common place around to find a hamburger at.
Then you come along and (correctly, but uselessly) point out that the laws of physics do not rule out the possibility of finding a hamburger sitting around in some random persons back yard, and so such places should all be equally searched as well.
Yet if you or I were to travel to a country we have never been to before and happened to desire a hamburger, we would search out a restaurant knowing the chance of finding a hamburger there, even without ever having visited a restaurant in that country before.
No one is actually arguing that it wouldn't be possible to find a hamburger in a random persons backyard (although many would argue if it would be a good idea to eat it
Likewise, we know life on earth is more likely to be found in water than not.
That doesn't mean there is NO life outside of the water at all, just that the odds of finding it in water are higher than finding it elsewhere.
Again, no one is actually arguing that water is required for life in general, only that our sample of one shows a much higher chance of finding it, and our sample size of one is all we have to formulate characteristics to actually look for and detect.
So looking for life in water, that is similar to life on earth, is what we have the best description of (as crappy as it may be) and so the best chance of actually detecting, and our one sample shows it as the highest likelihood of occurring in water.
This is why we look for water and use the characteristics of life we have to match on - because it gives the best chance of success.
As our samples of majorly differing life forms increases and our characteristics to match on increase, we will have better odds of success looking elsewhere.
But with our current knowledge and technical level, it makes no sense to search for hamburgers in random back yards when we can search in restaurants first.
You always aim for the low hanging fruit first, then move on to the harder to reach fruit after.
You have to learn to walk before you can run.
Insert additional cheesy proverbs here (especially if they make good hamburger toppings! sorry, I think I'm hungry)
Just because searching for life as we know it in water is the first step does not exclude all the other harder to detect steps, it only delays them until later, hopefully to a time we are better equipped to do so both with technology and our knowledge.
It's also worth pointing out that no one is actually forcing you to look in the most common places for the things we know how to detect - you are free to look anywhere you like for things you can't describe, if you so wish.
It's just that your odds of success are so drastically lower, even compared to the already seemingly low chances in finding life in water on another world, that few people would be willing to throw money at you for the task.
And that, put simply, is why we look for water on other worlds in our search for life.