I understand your meaning. Life “as we know it” is a narrow view of what possibilities there may be for life. And there may absolutely be some kind of life that is built on other materials. At the same time, water (and carbon) have particular chemical properties that make them fundamentally important for building stuff from molecules in general, that goes beyond “we only use those cuz they happened to be here”
Doesn’t even need water…
A fluid medium helps, but it never had to be water. Whatever the medium is, any life that evolves would adapt to it.
This is more about finding water so we can move humans there
I agree this is true for the search for extraterrestrial life, but I don’t think humans are gonna evolve quick enough for anything but water to cut it
Water isnt just any old fluid medium, it has a lot of important properties.
It has important qualities to us because we evolved to exist in it as a medium…
If life evolved in liquid methane, then methane would have important qualities that we’d think are needed.
Like, that was the whole point of my comment
But I disagree. Water is special and unique. You can’t just swap it with a random liquid and have the same support for life.
As we know it…
I’m sorry I can’t explain this in a way that helps you understand
I understand your meaning. Life “as we know it” is a narrow view of what possibilities there may be for life. And there may absolutely be some kind of life that is built on other materials. At the same time, water (and carbon) have particular chemical properties that make them fundamentally important for building stuff from molecules in general, that goes beyond “we only use those cuz they happened to be here”
Yep, only for life as we know it (and we have a sample size of exactly 1)