There has to be some kind of life in the Universe.
What bugs me is people saying "There is no water here, so no life can exist"
On a different planet, they could use a different solvent to grow from.
(funny youtube link elided)
Well put, and that's an excellent supporting citation
"If you only have access to a Wookie, you will need a larger lake".
For additional comedy, try turning on the google (beta) automated transcription captioning.
Water...colorless, odorless and without taste, and yet no living thing can survive without it.
I will begin by assuming you only want the five minute argument, rather than the full half-hour (since you wisely indicated doubt rather than certainty arising from the quote)
Within my filter bubble and shallowly researched experience, based as it is upon flimsy evidentiary support that satisfies my cognitive biases, I will also assume that most people here would be aware of the
Simulation Argument. (I happen to believe it is flawed, but nonetheless useful, even if it does derive from many similar arguments and resources in philosophy). I also may not be indicating or advocating my personal beliefs, since they aren't relevant on this occasion. If you don't like the simulation argument, perhaps many-universes might serve the same purpose; Special Creation certainly would, in a limited case (making certain other assumptions).
You could already be communicating (one-way) with aliens. You may not share anything as basic as the laws of physics with them, since they invented those. Water may, indeed, be necessary for life in our universe - but it may only *exist* in our universe for that reason (an interesting variation on the Anthropological Principle)
You (and certainly we as a race), may prefer to think of and hope for aliens that are both like us (for we can be lonely, and want to have an easier time comprehending what we're dealing with) and at the same time different (so that we can both retain our uniqueness, and perhaps to be able to demonize or worship them as the occasion demands), but those are just more biases and prejudices. It may be likely, or even wildly more probable, that carbon-based life arising around abundant water is an easier path, but I think it would be astonishingly hard to prove that other possibilities are negligible or non-existent.
For example, as I alluded to (now and previously), a technologically mature race (whether or not it has the energy budget and ethical makeup to allow Ancestor Simulations - this point is decoupled from that) may no longer need water, assuming they ever did. Based on another allusion, they may not even interact on a sufficiently long or short time scale that we can easily understand, even if they were not so extremeophilic to allow us to perceive them at all (e.g. existing in stars/nebulae/globular clusters/gas giants, or yet more abstract or difficult environs).
In my first post in the thread, I asked if anyone was depressed about the likelihood of being able to have contact with comprehensible sentient aliens.
For that to happen, we have to:
a) Be very, very lucky - on an astronomical scale, in terms of both space and time. Water? Ha! Check out iron and stellar nucleosynthesis, then put our own prerequisites for life together again probalistically.
b) Not be in a simulation (or indeed Creation) constrained such that we are the only sentient beings in contactable range (it would be amusing if we're unique in our universe due to processing or storage constraints).
c) Avoid extinction for a sufficiently long time (through to a Singularity, perhaps? another time...), and be very patient - a hundred years isn't even the blink of an eye.
d) (IMVHO) Be open minded, and not such prigs about what we consider "life".
In short,
better citation needed
Even if water IS really cool.
