"I would wake up to 30 or 35 texts from his most current reading of the script."
I have a friend who does this. I'll get a dozen texts when I wake up and yep, it's like "when do you sleep"
We have a name for it, and that's crazy.
You'd think that people looking for life in the sea or life in the stars would have come to a conclusion by now, but we've been listening to radio for a long time (SETI) and sending submersibles in to the twilight zone and down to the trenches for a while now.
In the deep ocean where there's no light, we don't see anything when we turn the lights on because we scare all the creatures away. We might need ultra-bright LEDs to see in the dark, but creatures down there have eyes so sensitive that we can blind them with a flashlight.
SETI has been concentrated on radio frequencies that are probably too low to make into a tight-beam transmission that could reach us from one of the Earth-like planets we know about. I think as we detect more Earth-like planets with better equipment, we'll see signs of life.