All science is accomplished by doing the exact opposite of the scientific method, which you’re essentially appealing to here. The scientific method isn’t how sc

All science is accomplished by doing the exact opposite of the scientific method, which you’re essentially appealing to here. The scientific method isn’t how science is created, it’s how it’s finalized. In some way the scientific method part is the most important but least interesting part of proving a theory. Having a theory doesn’t mean the theory is wrong, it just means you can’t yet prove it is wrong. Any good theory has a very strong intuition to back it, otherwise why investigate it with the scientific method? A good theory should have some basis that’s logically convincing. You can definitely hype your theory while you prove it. That’s how you get other scientists to know of your theory and collaborate. A lot of scientific papers are doing exactly that - peddling an unproven theory by providing a proven step towards that ultimate theory. My feeling is the “life must exist” theory is probably right. The problem for proving will be materially improving the ability to move mass and information in sufficient quantities and at sufficient rates to have any chance of proving anything one way or the other. But in order to prove the theory you need only one instance if it exists and we can make reasoned guesses about life we understand to see if there’s life like us as an optimization. That seems like a good advantage for proving life exists. The disproof of life in the universe is even harder - you essentially need to comb everywhere and everything for patterns that aren’t explained by the local environment to disprove. I think it’s unlikely the theory will be disproven. The longer we go without positive proof though the more likely we can not prove it but can assume life doesn’t exist outside this planet. But we haven’t gone very far for very long in the scale of human history, and given the acceleration of advancement over the last 500 years I don’t think it’s fair to say we’ve explored the space of the problem sufficient to assume life doesn’t exist. And if it does exist, they likely have laser sharks and antimatter bombs. That’s why the Fermi paradox is so hyped.