Would Finding Alien Life Change Religious Philosophies?

[Warren Stupidity]

108. again, the claim that life is unique to earth is the extraordinary claim.

that is what needs evidence to validate it. Absent proof of the uniqueness claim, life is not unique to this planet. I agree that proving life is unique to earth cannot be done by demonstrating it does not and never has existed anywhere else. That is permanently beyond our capabilities, although not impossible given infinite resources and time to examine every planet in the universe. On the other hand we are likely to have evidence of life elsewhere within the decade, either from Mars or from our fast increasing capabilities of remote exoplanet examination. Yes the current lack of direct evidence allows room for the uniqueness argument, but the room it allows shrinks as the number of known earth similar relatively nearby exoplanets increases. The probability of uniqueness is effectively nil. It is far more likely that catastrophic climate change is just a localized data anomaly.