[opportunity (OP)]

I hope I'm not out of line.

All quips aside, does anyone know what I'm saying?

Are we hedging out bets to get to another planet, have to (why?), or are we hedging our bets on staying here and making it work for a long time?

Am I right in saying that there is a "massive" amount of curiosity regarding life on other planets, and where we may have come from, to inspire the need to go to places like Mars, boots on ground with shovels and probes...to spin where we came from, like there's a Nobel prize to prove that somehow if life is found elsewhere?

I was asked in another thread what the definition of consciousness was. Science doesn't know...."how it began". Poets know "what it is in the here and now", philosophers know "what it is in the here and now", but science doesn't doesn't know "how it started". If you ask me, science is vastly outnumbered in trying to find the meaning of consciousness.

[opportunity (OP)]

Is science really looking for life "elsewhere" to explain where it came from? My point is this: you find life elsewhere, then the question beckons, "where did life come from there".....and then you go to that other new place and ask the question, "where did life come from there"......its a Russian doll. One could draw a line through the planets and ask where life works best....Earth. Is that so strange?

Using the Russian doll analogy, we could say life "came" from the stars if its true the smallest item of life as we would understand it would be furthest away along that line. But what is the relevance of that to us as humans on a planet we already call home? Who's to say that the planets aren't moving away from the sun and we are merely witnessing the decay of life along that process? Why is evidence of microbial activity beyond Earth "the source" of life? Could it be the remnant of something that existed as we do now in an eternal universe forever going through cycles, and would science know the difference?