Just in terms of probability, the chance that our species should arise and become self-aware on a planet like this (one with water and a hospitable climate) is infinitesimal. One could conjure up some rough probabilities for various events required for our civilisation to come about (our universe beginning its existence, the Milky Way forming, Earth forming at a habitable distance from the sun, water forming on the surface of our Earth, etc.) and multiply them together to form some minuscule compounded probability for our existence. Of course, this would be a wildly incorrect estimation as many of these events are consequences of their precedents. Anyhow, the overall odds that we should even be here are not in our favor.
Understandably, due to our seemingly lucky existence, our species is infatuated with broadening and solidifying our understanding of why we might have suddenly (on a cosmic timescale) popped into existence. We dig deep holes in our soil, rock, and ice to gather knowledge of conditions which may have given way for proto-life to form. Unlike astronomy, however, we cannot simply look deeper and deeper to reveal the secrets of the past. Much of the past, in its physical form, did not wait around for us to study it and is now lost to decomposition and tectonic changes. Our dream is to find a life-form with origins similar enough to ours (and preferably primitive enough) that we can deduce something about our own origins.
The narrative would go something like the following: we explore venues hospitable to life (as we know it), find something similar to our own concept of life and classify it as less developed than ourselves, and use what we can deduce about its evolutionary lineage to justify our own. We search for other life forms under hefty influence of our confirmation bias. We search under the notion that whatever we find must be inferior.
Explore, discover, classify, degrade, call it a day. This rings a bell. To me, it sounds fairly similar to the pseudoscientific beliefs about race applied by white folk to the people of countries they were colonizing.
Side note: You could of course ask, “What if we found something ‘more advanced’ than ourselves?”. I, in this case, believe that it would have found us first and perhaps applied the same logic to us (if it is subject to some of the same un-humanistic principles we’ve developed here, at home).
Apropos confirmation bias, why do we make the assumption that alternate life forms must be water based? Given the already tiny probability that we would exist in the first place, what is the probability that any other life we find should follow the same chance-ridden path? Are we doing ourselves a massive disservice by guarding this idea as the key to life?
I stumbled on a laughable (computer programming related) tweet a while back which read, “Whenever you write code that feels hacky, just remember that a computer is just a rock we tricked into thinking”. Pardon my humor, but, who is to say there aren’t sentient rock people on planets which we haven’t bothered placing at because they weren’t wet on the surface?