Expecting alien life to look any certain way at all is already a logical flaw. At best we could speculate on likely chemistries and even that would be little more than guesswork

Yes, water is a stunning force of nature though, I would not be surprised if alien life didn't depend on it but I also would not be surprised at all if it did to some degree.

Exactly. Gun to my head id say there's a 99.999% if we ever discover life outside of earth it will be carbon based life requiring liquid water. But who the fuck knows really

One of the things I will never forgive Chemistry for is how it didn't introduce Acid and Bases from the perspective of a continuum of modifications on Water molecules that can accentuate into an "imbalance" and thus how Water is really the natural language of translation between Acids and Bases functionally.

It makes it all so less arbitrary from that perspective, but Chemistry is atrocious with the big idea stuff lol.

The way I see it is like how molds on a petri dish and human cities tend to grow in similar shapes. There are natural patterns and molecules that are useful for certain types of things, I would suspect Alien Life to stumble upon many of the same useful chemical and physical mechanisms Life on Earth has but the story of how it happened would likely be confoundingly different in surprising ways we wouldn't expect. It wouldn't be life "happening the same way" for Alien Life to have evolved based on water and carbon blueprints, rather it is more like putting a growing organism on a flat plane, there are natural rhythms and patterns that echo throughout our universe that optimizing systems will find and build upon.

I mean if you step back and think about it, if some of the basic chemical processes that Life on Earth does were possible on an Alien planet with Alien life that was unable to exploit that advantage... wouldn't that be in a way of sort of strange refutation of evolutionary theory? Why would an obvious chemical pathway be left unexploited by life in competition with itself?

Of course complexity is always a barrier, evolution isn't perfect or instant, it doesn't necessarily explore every possible solution before settling on one that is good enough in a context, but it begs the question, if the processes on Earth that are optimal for Life to Exploit are found on other planets, why would either Life on Earth or Alien Life be substantially suboptimal in its solutions compared to the other? Wouldn't that suggest some magic difference in Evolutionary capacity of Life in one place vs another in a way that crumbles away upon rational inspection?

To put it bluntly, if we have no proof the laws of physics differ elsewhere in the observable universe, why should we expect Evolution to behave differently? No matter if the characters names are different and the stories happen according to their own unique paths, we are still playing with most of the same weaving patterns.

If you had a sea full of SiO2 and CaCO3 well animals that need homes are gonna eventually stumble on that as a building material right?

But isnt that what the pH level measures: the -log(concentration of H3O+)? (where 7 is where the concentration balances that of OH-)

Yes that is precisely what it measures, but Chemistry teachers confidently taught me the pH scale over and over again like an an arbitrary continuum to memorize until I finally independently framed acids and bases in a perspective that illuminated the central role of water.

Yes technically if you just learn the pH scale you should be able to conclude that I guess but sorry not sorry most Chemistry I have dealt with is completely ignorant of the power of teaching people big ideas. Everything is fiddly, disconnected and full of little memorization rules that feel utterly arbitrary even when they precisely predict reality.

If my geology professors had taught Chemistry they would have started with big ideas like that, but Chemists taught me chemistry.

Idk electron shells just got explained better by Physics and I am pissed I had to sit there and memorize all the stupid Chemistry cargo cult rules around how electron shells "worked" when it was clearly hamfisted and nonsense.