When Scientists look for life on other planets…?
Yeah they do, but… without alternative biologies to study we can only make guesses about how they might work (and pretty wild guesses at that). Without an understanding of that, it’s pretty hard to guess what we should be looking for. Looking for liquid water and/or free oxygen makes sense since these are requirements for the only kind of life we know how to look for. The other alternative is to just collect all information you can and hope to find something interesting. In other words: no focus at all. Which is why scientists don’t limit themselves to _only_ collecting information about water or oxygen. It’s just that these are things we know we want to look for. It’s all pretty speculative, because there are no instruments yet to do this kind of research. You’d need to collect spectra from planets around other stars — which is NOT an easy thing to do (it’s well beyond our present technology). So, really when you read about stuff like this, you’re hearing scientists trying to speci
