Just in case, let’s check if one of Jupiter’s moons, packed with salt and freezing near absolute zero, happens to have life. Sounds like a great way to spend public money.
"The scientific consensus is that a layer of liquid water exists beneath Europa's surface, and that heat from tidal flexing allows the subsurface ocean to remain liquid."
Liquid water is hardly "freezing near absolute zero".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Subsurface_ocean
Searching for life elsewhere seems so empty and unsatisfying. Almost like a religious quest for enlightenment or something. If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
To me, finding any extra terrestrial life, or even just a fossil of past life, would be the most exciting find in the history.
Imagine humans no longer fighting each other, but rather working together towards a goal. I can think of nothing that would catalyze such a change more than the discovery of extra terrestrial life. Even climate change isn't doing it.
Europa Clipper "is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission" [1]. If you want to mine asteroids, learning to send big spacecraft to the far end of the asteroid belt seems like a no brainer.
> If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
Depends on what we find. Think about the density of medical knowledge we extract from the Amazon basin every year. New biochemistries could be game changing in ways we can't predict. (We have enough trouble predicting how known organic chemistries behave. It is overwhelmingly likely, if alien biochemistries exist, that they show us new science.)
If it's similar to terrestrial biochemistry, on the other hand, that suggests our bodies might do better extraterrestrially than we've assumed. That, in turn, could catalyse the investment and support needed to mobilise a multi-generational effort towards colonising space. (Their morphology could also give us hints on how to survive in that environment. Biomimicry on a whole new level.)
There'd be a massive jump in the likelihood of finding a living snail.
And there would be an ever bigger jump in the likelihood of some billionaire being the first to eat extraterrestrial escargot.
But sure, we could just focus all our attention on increasing our industrial capacity and expansion. Although that also seems so empty and unsatisfying to me.
This is a value statement. Every answer from heroin to petting my cat is technically a valid answer.
OP's question is written obnoxiously. But it raises a valid point: why should we do these things, and why should it matter to people who don't find it inherently valuable?