OK... Serious question here: we find "life" (algae?) on one of Saturn's moons or one of Jupiter's moons. So, we spend ~$50 Billion (arguably much more) and find "life". So? Why is this important to people? There isn't one chance in (place your own word here) that we can do anything about it or even send humans there. Seriously want to know what people really think...
My honest reason (and this is coming from a guy with no stake in the game or significant physics or biology knowledge) is that it would just be cool as fuck, and that exploration is valuable in itself.<p>I'll acknowledge that that is wishy-washy language, but that's kind of my point. I'm not sure I can point to an objective "good" that comes out of it, but I also don't know that that's the norm for these kinds of things either. It might have been hard to say that going to the moon was an objective "good" outside of one-upping the Russians, but I <i>do</i> think it's good that we did it, even if I don't really know how to quantify why.
Because of statistics. If we can find life, potentially started independently or pollinated in a couple of planets close to each-other, then life is everywhere and we may be in a dark forest of intelligent or hidden native predatory beings waiting to wipe us out if we squeak or show up elsewhere. If it's not as frequent, then we can keep exploring to look for it and more human-habitable spots.
I have a premonition that even if extraterrestrial life is discovered, and even if intelligent, <i>hostile</i> extraterrestrial life is somehow discovered, humans are not going to leave it alone.<p>After all, everyone involved can just say it's inevitable! If we don't do it, someone else will.
A majority of the planet thinks life started here. Finding it elsewhere would culturally be a cosmic (puns) shift of before alien life existed verifiably and after.
Benjamin Franklin is said to have replied, "What use is a new-born baby?" in response to a skeptic of the utility of some of the first balloon launches.<p>I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.<p>Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?<p>I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the floor. My clothes are made of cotton, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?
>So? Why is this important to people?<p>Because it could then tell us if it's related to us or not, potentially we could get to see how life unrelated to us looks like, how life in general is originally formed, how likely in the universe it is...<p>I honestly struggle to imagine how it can be considered unimportant, unless your stating position is that said life is completely unreachable to current and future tech, which I don't find likely.
<p><pre><code> > Seriously want to know what people really think...
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(in a vacuum) i think we would all be saying thats amazing and fundamentally change the way we see ourselves and place in the universe (science fiction becomes science fact) and open new possibilities for research and discoveries<p><pre><code> > find "life". So? Why is this important to people?
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when there are more down-to-earth problems right in front of us, i get this as well; why not use that money to fund free college for a couple years for all citizens etc etc
"~$50 Billion"<p>Are you saying people would rather have an apartment? It would house 250,000 people for 10 years. But the slime is cooler.