Been Awhile - So How's Life?

 ANYBODY ELSE OUT THERE??

I realize it's been too long but I've been taken up with life, the act of living it, looking at it, the breath-taking, horrible beauty of interacting with fellow humans in a real world, and not from behind a sterile monitor.  Recently I was forced to interact with a dentist.
Con premisso, I'd like to present again the premise that life, in the 3 forms evolving on this planet, could very well be a mutation, a fluke,  an amazing coincidence of the timing of one nucleated cell with one stroke of electricity from extreme lighting in one perfect little watery environment.  It's either too chaotically organized or far too directed to be the natural result of a water molecule with a strong electrical charge, instigating this incredible mechanism of mitosis, no less miosis. 
                           

MITOSIS CELL DIVISION

When cells tear themselves in two - a directed intelligent act - their agenda would seem to be survival via multiplication.  Strength in numbers perhaps?  Imperative to "become" what it "intends"?  I don't know, I'm sure others can explain.  Yet when single-celled life becomes a complex multi-celled organism, an awareness develops that super-cedes the simple understandable need to live, as in a molecule of mold.  We call this life and depending on the advancement of it's evolution, it can become something beyond the pure instinct to eat and reproduce.  It becomes aware.   
If this were, say, 1850 and two men on horseback were talking, think about this  conversation:
"I heard they've come up with a faster way to get around", says one.
"Wow, faster horses", says the other.
These men are not thinking of airplanes or even cars, their only mode of ambulation is by horseback, so they're thinking "faster" means faster horses. 
In this century when we think of inter-galactic life, we don't think of jellyfish, we imagine a humanoid or at the very least, a host body with appendages.  Are we sure we'd even recognize intelligent life on another galactic body?  Surely, we hypothesize, it would have awareness. 

TALK ABOUT ALIEN - THIS IS AN EARTHLING.

When we send out probes like the amazing Voyagers to search for life, or even intelligence (SETI) do we really understand how desperate an act it would seem to any living entity of thought we encounter?  Humans are so fearful of the idea that life here on Earth is all of life, and the actual only definition of life is contained soley on this planet because it does not exist anywhere else.  Still, why should this be impossible? Mars contains no fossil remains - why?  Asteroids and comets brought water to Mars much the same as they did to Earth.  Water makes an assumption of the prospect of life.  Some thing of perhaps a very simple structure could have easily taken root on Mars many hundreds of millions of years ago, dying out for a plethora of reasons.  Their fossil remains would be imprinted in the rock, sleeping beneath the regolith - why nothing so far?  It should be as obvious as the the fossils of extinct branches of humanity we've found on this most unique water planet.

NEANDERTHAL SKULL

Then I look at Europa and think of that underground ocean, I look at those rusty "stripes" criss-crossing this Jovian moon.  They remind me of red algae. 

 ANAGLYPH OF EUROPA AND IMPACT SCAR

 

This is anthropomorphic thinking I realize, but no one is immune to that desire as I say to finally end the question of whether we're "alone".  I know I'd be ecstatic to meet some Europanese algae!  Still, perhaps it's time to put down our toys. 

We need, I believe, to look at "life" in a more calculated, less emotional way, difficult as that is, for until humanity can accustom itself to the prospect if having only itself for company, we most certainly will continue reaching out, sending signals, listening, imagining, dreaming and....hoping hoping hoping. 
Hope may spring eternal but who wants to live that long?  Life is too, well - fickle! 
Thank you and good night.  I expect to change my mind by Wednesday.