Because we make some assumptions about what and how life should be. The question 'what is life?' is itself is unanswered. There fore to imagine earth like planets with earth like intelligent humans is sort of a wrong assumption to start with. As per Stephen Hawking, there might be life in stars too! A kind of life which we don't understand. They might argue, earth like planets to be too cold to survive or water to be dangerous to life.
What we know so far is a lot, but even that lot- is more or less like a drop of water in all oceans in the world.
Sometimes people unsuccessfully try to solve problems the traditional way. But somebody comes along and totally changes the paradigm of thought and presents solutions to problem in ways and directions unimaginable before. Those solutions look like a 'bolt from the blue' taking people totally by surprise. Like how Marian Rejewski surprised everybody else by cracking the German Enigma cipher. Such solutions are likely to give us deep insights in the future.
But for the moment 'impossible' should be banned word for stuff like this.
Totally agree. Even our assumptions on the concept of time are debatable. Sure, we could say the our planet is n years old, but we assume time is something linear, inflexible. When it comes to the unknown, we can't say some things are impossible. And kudos for the Marjan Rejewski reference! I'm into cryptography lately, and it's (another) amazing story.
Because we make some assumptions about what and how life should be. The question 'what is life?' is itself is unanswered. There fore to imagine earth like planets with earth like intelligent humans is sort of a wrong assumption to start with. As per Stephen Hawking, there might be life in stars too! A kind of life which we don't understand. They might argue, earth like planets to be too cold to survive or water to be dangerous to life.
What we know so far is a lot, but even that lot- is more or less like a drop of water in all oceans in the world.
Sometimes people unsuccessfully try to solve problems the traditional way. But somebody comes along and totally changes the paradigm of thought and presents solutions to problem in ways and directions unimaginable before. Those solutions look like a 'bolt from the blue' taking people totally by surprise. Like how Marian Rejewski surprised everybody else by cracking the German Enigma cipher. Such solutions are likely to give us deep insights in the future.
But for the moment 'impossible' should be banned word for stuff like this.