Finding amino acids on an asteroid confirms something we already knew. They can be available without showing evidence of life.
The real mystery thus remains life itself. The fact that on Earth it used amino acids to express itself doesn't mean that it is necessarily limited to that single choice. It also doesn't mean that the same process would repeat in a different world, even if all the preconditions were met, i.e. the necessary for the presence of life as we can recognize it.
For all our understanding of (earthly) biology, and the tools at our disposal that we use to decide that something is alive, we still don't really know what life is, or how it begins. On another world it might as well kickstart the magic with a different medium than amino acids (e.g. more crystalline structures, some energy forms such as light or electricity, etc), with entirely different rules of replication and sustenance. It would probably make life look different to us, potentially not recognizable or even detectable.
Heck, it could happen right here, under our nose and we'd be none the wiser.
I've always wondered about this too, but kind of landed on something like this:
Sure, there might be (and probably is) life out there that falls so far outside our definition of "life" that we would never detect it. If it's undetectable, and maybe even incomprehensible, to us, then what's the point in even thinking about it in the context of a "search for life"? What we really mean by the question "Is there life out there?" is "Is there life out there that's similar enough to the life we see on Earth that we could recognize it as such and interact with it?"
I don't have a good way to phrase what I'm getting at without sounding dismissive - I do think it's interesting to think about other forms of "life", but it seems almost philosophical at that point and not scientific.
Honestly I think similarity is a bit of a red herring. The most interesting question is whether there are other beings we can communicate with in any sense of the word, so that we may learn from each other. For a somewhat trivial example, if we found robots on another planet, we would not consider them "life", but it would nevertheless be an incredibly important discovery.
On the other hand, it's of course imaginable that there are beings that we would in principle consider intelligent agents, but who exist in a way that in practice we have no hope of recognizing as such. Again to pick a somewhat trivial example, if galaxies were in fact intelligent beings that take billions of years to form a single thought, we may both in principle be very interested in communicating with each other, but in practice could never even hope to recognize each other as sentient beings, because of the intense difference in time scale.
> Honestly I think similarity is a bit of a red herring. The most interesting question is whether there are other beings we can communicate with in any sense of the word
Much the same thing, as I read it: I think the GP meant "similar" in the sense of "alike us in that it even does 'communicate' in any sense in the first place".
There are certain questions that are so stubbornly elusive to science (as the study of nature), that they should feel by now to belong to the realm of philosophy (e.g matter, consciousness, mathematics, an infinite universe). The study of life itself, not its manifestation in nature, has so far displayed all those fleeting qualities.
But I guess science is stubborn too, so let's see where we get.
See the 'God of the Gaps' argument. At any given time, there has been a list of things considered to be the rightful domain of philosophers and theologians rather than logical positivists. So far, the list has only gotten smaller.
The possibility of extremely exotic new types of life has to be a given, but with Earthlike starting conditions turning out to be relatively prevalent and the robustness of convergent evolution (not to mention the possibility of some kind of panspermia event) there's just as good of an argument to be prepared for extra-terrestrial life to be similar to us in shocking ways.
The real mystery thus remains life itself. The fact that on Earth it used amino acids to express itself doesn't mean that it is necessarily limited to that single choice. It also doesn't mean that the same process would repeat in a different world, even if all the preconditions were met, i.e. the necessary for the presence of life as we can recognize it.
For all our understanding of (earthly) biology, and the tools at our disposal that we use to decide that something is alive, we still don't really know what life is, or how it begins. On another world it might as well kickstart the magic with a different medium than amino acids (e.g. more crystalline structures, some energy forms such as light or electricity, etc), with entirely different rules of replication and sustenance. It would probably make life look different to us, potentially not recognizable or even detectable.
Heck, it could happen right here, under our nose and we'd be none the wiser.