have you seen the movie "Europa Report"? I recommend you check it out, it's exactly what you guys are talking about. kinda.

@GenericNameHere

The problem is, how do you define whats life and whats not in the context of the universe? since we dont know what other types of life there can be out there, we can only look for something that we understand as "living" and that's why we look for water.

Otherwise we would just look into planet after planet and try to see if whatever is in there is alive in any form (not necessarily our way of defining being alive)

We need a criteria to look into the cosmos. its just way to big to do it randomly and trying to make sense of the data. Looking for known patterns (water and all its associated phenomena) is the best bet we ve got. besides, if we find beings with a biology similar to ours, its gonna be easier to interact with than say - ethereal beings