Thanks for the Carl Sagan clip, excellent out of the box thinking!
Originally posted by Jomina
My thought is that the universe is teeming with life, and that life takes as many forms as there are particles in the universe.
I thought so at one point too, but if it was teeming with intelligent life, there's reason to believe Seti researchers might have found something by
now. However looking at our own planet, we have been transmitting radio waves for only 100 years of the 3.5 billion that life has existed here, so on
a time scale, intelligent life has been rare here, it may be rare elsewhere also? Anyway I still think life elsewhere in some form probably exists.
Originally posted by Jomina
Personal outlook only, I suppose, but... there's a lot of evidence for lifeforms on just our planet alone taking forms and stages that are as varied,
and completely shocking to biologists, as can be imagined.
That's an excellent point and even Seti researchers find those "extremophiles" fascinating glimpses into how what we thought was impossible, might
be possible.
Originally posted by Jomina
What makes our little place so special, hmm? 
To me, it's not, and we'll find all kinds of things once we REALLY start looking.
The only problem I see with finding other life forms that aren't carbon based, is, how will we know what to look for? Obviously if we found kilometer
wide behemoths floating around like in Sagan's video it might be obvious, but then again it might be subtle and hard to detect. I thought some of the
difficulties were portrayed rather well in this "Star Trek TNG" episode:
Star Trek TNG Ep 17-Home Soil
Despite some insistence from the ship's computer that, lacking organic structure, the crystal simply can't be life (why exactly aren't
Starfleet medical programs informed of the silicon-based Horta encountered by the old Enterprise crew?), alive is exactly the right word. Alive,
growing, and angry at the attempted extermination of its species by the terraformers.
So if non-carbon based life is out there, detecting it could be a little tricky, or a LOT tricky!
