"weird life" is pretty basic idea in astrobiology. The scientists in the field are very much aware of the concept. From the article > plenty of other experts s

"weird life" is pretty basic idea in astrobiology. The scientists in the field are very much aware of the concept. From the article > plenty of other experts suggest that life elsewhere might be so different, so fundamentally alien, as to be unrecognizable to us as life. Surprisingly, a pretty big question amongst scientists searching for life on other planets is what life even means. Would we know it when we saw it? --- > We may have to accept that some entities might exist beyond our grasp of understanding and should develop novel tools that seek not only life as we know it, but any form of organized complexity that could denote a radically different kind of life. Maybe at some point, but right now we haven't even scrathed the surface in the search, and with limited resources it makes sense to start first by looking for earth-like life, and eventually expand the search for weirder things. > Such a perspective fundamentally changes the narrative of our search for alien life. I don't really find that to be the case. If anything, the weird life narrative might be overemphasized in the popsci/scifi communities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_chauvinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_chauvinism