[gyomu]

> other life in the solar system (which seems like a pretty hard "no" to me as a lay person),

There’s so much we don’t know about the solar system, little bacteria crawling around deep under the crust of a moon or swirling about in a gassy giant doesn’t seem too far fetched.

Wormy fishy creatures (or even more complex than that) under the ice of Europa is a bit more of a stretch, but even then I don’t think we’re aware of anything that would outright refute that possibility as of now.

[lm28469]

And people tend to forget about time. There might have been bacterias somewhere 1b years ago or in 1b years.

Space is big as fuck but when you add time in the mix it's as close to infinite as you can get.

[ceejayoz]

Yeah, ruling anything out when we’re still finding new muscles (https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/medical-adva...) and weird structures (https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-obelisk-any...) in humans - to which we have plenty of access - seems deeply premature.

[mrguyorama]

The traditional way to demonstrate this is how little we know about the ocean floor and the types, styles, and varieties of life therein.

Every time we look we find a textbook's worth of new types of creatures, and usually break at least one minor "rule" of how life works, for example, "dark oxygen".