Perusal on Our Search for Life: Questioning and Suggesting

Why are Earth’s scientific agencies and minds, or at least most that are popularly heard about/from, so focused on limiting our official searches for extraterrestrial life to “sweet zones” and “metal abundances” and such life-limiting scenarios? Do they know something they are not telling us? Are they that caught in such a deep human-centric paradigm trap? And why are uber-world class minds such as Mr. Hawking sounding the flight alarm that a super advanced life species might use their esoteric technologies to look throughout the universe to feed themselves, as if in their super-advancement of physics and space travel they had forgotten all about solving the food and waste disposal problem and we would be the prime roast, sushi, Tabuli or Muktuk on their ideal dinner menu? What is happening, or has happened, to promote such limited perspectives?

Has any one or body called for a scientific/common sense interdisciplinary team to hash out a set of prerequisites for ET life in any form? And how shall or do we define "life", exactly or broadly. A personal perspective is that our scientific communities should greatly expand the definition of life and consequently the physico-chemical settings for the creation and evolution of life. Likewise, as Feynman pointed the great range of magnitudes spanning the nano-to-galactic scales, advanced life could be several orders of magnitude different in scale from humans and still have enough manipulative distance in scale to develop technologies - and why exactly are thumbs needed when on earth we have such outstanding natural nano-scale engineering forms such as the the exuded, lacy exosceletal forms in the seas and soil, and even the many magnitudes smaller viruses?

What does seem universally required is a source of some kind of POTENTIAL (in the physico-mechanico-chemical sense, or in some other sense we are not yet advanced to be aware of), to drive the ORGANIZATION of life, i.e. to combat the natural drift of entropy which means a mechanism to counteract the normal, disruptive drift of ENTROPY, i.e. decay. This requirement does not self-define Goldilockian “sweet zones”, earth-chemistry or even species large enough for us to see (or a species might be too large to for us to notice its “organization”). Supra-large organization of SENTIENCE (life?) could exist with scaled up densities that might look to us at our scales to be mist, fog, dust, near-vcuum but actually might be equivalent to flesh and blood in function - which perhaps represents another requisite of life, a MEDIUM to support functions such as signal (INFORMATION) TRANSPORT? And what about maintaining a state of negative entropy (SURVIVABILITY and REPLICATION). These capitalized words seem part of the descriptive matrix representing life and are not limited to earth-like settings.

In retrospect, such a possible life form would not be interested in us and probably would not notice us as pertinent to its interests of survival, enjoyment of life or whatever other activities dwell in the realm of its activities. Perhaps we would be viewed as we view Nematodes in our soil.

With such an expanded view, the issues we seem terribly concerned about such as “ethics” or predation have little or no meaning. Finally the Drake expression which is in danger of becoming a sacred cow: the observed frequency of supernovas which are galaxy-wide scourings (life-ending) by immense gamma ray explosions seem to reset the time-for-evolution every 4.5 billion years or so, and perhaps the Drake expression needs to be reviewed with this thought.