Christ Almighty dude, calm down. Yeah, maybe my comment was ignorant crap, but why jump straight to ad hominem? Do you think you’re actually going to change anyone’s opinion by calling them stupid straight off the bat?

I mean, genuinely, how? It’s not saying you need to be Japanese to enter, just that you need to be able to read Japanese. IMO, learning the local language of a country you plan to visit is a basic courtesy that too many people don’t bother with.

Okay, I take it back. I was thinking too much from the perspective of an American who’s been scolded for not spending enough time learning the language of places I visited. Thank you to the people who pointed out that what I said was ignorant without just piling on insults, I’ll try to be more thoughtful in the future.

Yes, my understanding is that it’s legal in the US to purchase prescription-only drugs from overseas as long as they’re only for personal use. It’s kind of a grey area but as long as they’re not scheduled substances, I and multiple people I know have saved a lot of money by buying prescription drugs from Europe and shipping them here (we have such a wonderfully broken system here, don’t we?)

Here’s the thing. We actually have NO idea what to look for. Our sample size of “planets that have life” is exactly one, which doesn’t really tell us much. Since we know that an Earth-like planet can support life, it makes sense to start our search there, but there’s no reason to believe that extraterrestrial life might not be completely and utterly different from anything on our little rock.

That being said, liquid water is extremely conducive to complex chemical reactions, which are probably required for complex life. But you also need chemicals that are both reactive enough to do things, but can be stable enough to not randomly break apart. This is one of the reasons carbon is so good at being alive, it’s reactive enough to bond with a lot of other elements (including itself), but not too reactive to be useful.

So basically, this isn’t new. It’s just pointing out that a pure “water world” might not be very useful without a bunch of lively chemicals to boot.