This isn't anthropomorphism and it's hard to see any bias in play. This is simple extrapolation from the physics and chemistry of the universe we can observe within the some 14bn light years range visible to us.
Of course there may be many different possible realisations if that chemistry. There may be many possible alternative structures other than DNA for things like heredity and alternative building blocks to proteins and such, but if there are such alternatives they are orders of magnitude more likely to be based on carbon chemistry than anything else.
If you rank the elements in the observable universe in order if prevalence, other than Helium you get the same answer as if you rank the elements in order if prevalence in our bodies. We are made of the most common materials anywhere in the universe. In terms of composition there is nothing special about us at all.
Finally, it's hard to see how natural selection or evolution are special to the conditions on Earth. There no real reason to believe that these would not apply to any other form of life.
So it's absolutely important that we try to be objective and keep an open mind. There may be much about the universe we don't know. I've already mentioned dark matter. But from what we do know, there are good reasons to look for life in worlds somewhat like our own.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/researchers-take-smal...
From my soap box, the religious self-policing, to me, is one of the more disconcerting aspects of the education system in the United States. As a personal observation, if a parent is worried that a single teacher providing an intentionally unbiased perspective on a philosophical topic is going to challenge a child's beliefs to the point where it overcomes a family's and church's indoctrination then it isn't the new perspective that's the problem. To this day I believe that "core curriculum" should include logic and philosophy with an emphasis greater than all other topics.
For example: This question
> Why is 1+0 = 1 and not 10
Attempt to find an answer will generate more questions and it is a journey down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you don't want to do that.
And upto high-school I learnt things that were based on assumptions that I kept questioning. Internet brought be some peace in my college years. Unfortunately, nowadays internet is also filled with fake/wrong/hoax/biased stuff.
First, hold one apple in each hand. Ask your child how many apples you have in one hand, them the other hand, then the total.
Then, hold two apples in one hand, with the other hand empty. Point out that you have two in one hand, and none, therefore zero, in the other. Have your child count the total number of apples, 2, and explain further how zero stands for no quantity. How when you have zero of something, you really have none.
First, we simply don't have evidence for such life, so we can't say that it does exist. We also can't say that it doesn't, and certainly not that it couldn't, but those are topics that make for good science fiction rather than incredibly fruitful topics for scientific inquiry. With that said there's certainly some really interesting stuff going on all the same! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology
That leads to the second thing that's stopping it from being a heavily studied topic, which is that it's currently getting crowded out by the search for conventional life that happens to not be on Earth. The argument here goes 'yes, life elsewhere might not look like life here, but we know a heck of a lot more about life here than we do about how other, highly different life forms could work, so it makes more sense to focus our study on life that looks like the greater 'us' of earth-bound life.'
I've really enjoyed the discussions I've had on this topic, so I hope this was interesting to you. Sorry your teacher acted like a jerk!
We assume so! But we restrict our scarce looking-for-life resources to conditions where we know life can exist.
The short answer is that if you define 'life' to be engines which convert energy into additional engines then yes there is life outside our perception of biological life, but at that point 'life' is just 'chemistry'. And 'engine' is defined to be a self-contained collection of elements that you can feed energy into.[1]
[1] I know not as crisp as it should be, but read the book its really interesting. Especially when you get to the point talking about geo-chemistry and bio-chemistry being the same thing pretty much.
That's one of my favorite thought experiments in approaching the definition of life:
Suppose we build some robots with AI, and send them into space, and they land on some planet.
Those robots can mine raw materials and build other robots like themselves.
They're able to learn and teach each other, and improve their design and invent new things on their own.
Fast forward a few hundred years. That planet now hosts a civilization of robots, with their own culture, planning their own excursions into space.
To an external observer searching for Life™ and Intelligence™ in the cosmos, what would make our robot civilization fail to be qualified as such?
;)
> Many biologists consider viruses to be non-living because they lack a cellular structure and cannot metabolize by themselves.
I think this would create a simple definition.
"The Devil in the Dark" Season 1 Episode 25
Meanwhile the Earth has a heart (core), blood (mantle), skin (crust) etc, it also throbs with 'life' unlike many other dead worlds out there.
Neptune is very much 'alive' compared to Uranus etc ...
Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is it possible that life exists outside our perception of biology? Afterall everything is just rules and actions that lead to predictable reactions (unless quantum physics says something else)
I look at artificial life - that exists in virtual environments. It looks like life - but we know it isn't for real. It cannot replicate/grow outside its environment. But that argument could be used to for all non-human life on Earth, if humans never existed.
Even stuff like mars rover could be engineered to mine, manufacture and duplicate - eventually creating a colony of rovers that populate the planet and consume the planet's resources. Well, that might look like semi-intelligent life - but we know it isn't - or is it life?