There's quite a bit of interest; e.g. ex-colleagues of mine have spent lots of effort on refining the 'chemoton' model. I think it's a fascinating subject.
"The basic assumption of the model is that life should fundamentally and essentially have three properties: metabolism, self-replication, and a bilipid membrane.[3] The metabolic and replication functions together form an autocatalytic subsystem necessary for the basic functions of life, and a membrane encloses this subsystem to separate it from the surrounding environment. Therefore, any system having such properties may be regarded as alive, and it will be subjected to natural selection and contain a self-sustaining cellular information."
It's like saying that mathematicians are uninterested in the Collatz conjecture. Scientists usually work on problems where they have a reasonable expectation of making progress. Attempts to replicate abiogenesis so far have been largely haphazard, with ill-defined criteria of what progress means.
And here’s another thing. With how difficult it is to probe new physics, we stand to do a lot more research by simply inspecting all the observable universe than trying to build colliders.
Inspecting the universe can be a lot harder than building colliders. Observing some of the short-lived high-energy particles would require shipping detectors to a high-energy location like the sun, then pulling a signal from all that noise.
A definitive position on the existence of aliens is not part of the Catholic faith.
But, the church admits the possibility and church institutions have done some explorations about what the implications of such contact might be, and how Catholic doctrine might apply to different possibilities.
Catholics officially believe in aliens, and that we should save them (if they weren’t visited by Jesus)
Reminds me of the punch line to an amusing first-contact cartoon, one that makes the (unstated) previous line easy enough to guess: "Yeah, he comes by every couple of years. We gave him a nice box of chocolates when he first visited. What'd you guys do?"
Muslims recite that Allah is “lord of all the worlds” every day. Think they’ll be fine. This is true of every religion I think, it’s only the non religious projecting that state it would “upend widely held beliefs”
