Water is a necessary component of life "as we know it," thus it makes sense that if we are going to find other life similar to life "as we know it," we're going

Water is a necessary component of life "as we know it," thus it makes sense that if we are going to find other life similar to life "as we know it," we're going to be inclined to check on places with water. That seems the opposite of throwing darts in the dark to me. A better metaphor is searching under the lamppost for our keys. We're inclined to search watery planets first because they seem like more straightforward candidates. Farming and roundtrip time isn't immediately that important since, at least in the short term, there's no goal of terraforming or mining these moons. It's about trying to see if we can find signs of existing life, and to see if that will teach us something about life in general in the universe, or at least in our corner of it. For example, if we find something similar to DNA on Europa, that would be a point in favor of the panspermia hypothesis, or perhaps indicate that Earth's own microbes have been hitching rides all over the solar system via impact event ejecta [0]. On the other hand, if we find life but it's vastly different from Earth life, that would be a huge point in favor of life being ubiquitous throught the universe. Finally, even if we don't find any life whatsoever, because there is a water ocean, we might find chemical precursors to life or other interesting chemicals that could reveal to us something about how our own oceans evolved, geologically and chemically. [0] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2013.1028 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2013.1028