Desperately Seeking Space Friends
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> But I suspect that only creatures that have hopes and dreams and fears similar to our own would actually have much impact on human loneliness. And finding that sort of creature may be a long shot indeed.
I've been saying this for many years, and have had the same suspicion for longer -- first of all, for most people beyond myopic (with good reason) zoologists or biologists, it's not about "alien" life -- plenty of that, arguably, in the Mariana trench etc, noone's noticing because it's an answer to the wrong question. Extrapolating this, it's not even about _extra-terrestrial_ life necessarily -- not for some of us -- finding living bacteria of non-terrestrial origin on Mars is going to be amazing and an epic discovery, but it's still an answer to the wrong question -- our search is deep down motivated by desire to communicate, to ask as if our own mirror "what is going on?", "why do we exist?", "have you guys figured it out" and last but not least -- "we are excited to meet you, for all our numbers we've been feeling lonely with so much space, thinking we were alone". Many a sci-fi author express the question much better, because that's the one that matters.
But to placate the level-headed empirists -- yes, discovering the bacteria or alien jelly-fish in the interstellar void, is of course scientifically a big thing. But I suspect we are just being cautious not wanting to utter that discovering these we just want to get _more_ excited about the possibilities the former allows -- that we _will_ meet sentient beings of intelligence who will in the very least understand us (with due effort), sort of like the extended family we suspect we have and always wanted to meet, but the meeting is always postponed.