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I agree with you willravel. We can no sooner call the search for extraterrestrial life a science than we can the search for God. They are both possible, I suppose, but there isn't enough evidence or any observations to act as a springboard for research or hypotheses.
Long before human flight, we had what we knew of air, gravity, and birds. Centuries before the Wright brothers successfully had lift off at Kitty Hawk, Leonardo da Vinci had designed workable concept machines based on what he observed in the world around him. That is the intelligence and technology we know of, and that is the kind of thing we should focus on.
I'm all for research into what is beyond our galaxy, but to focus on finding life isn't sound science; it is a hope. We should focus on what we find and try to understand it. If we find life, so be it, but it is a waste of resources to do so as a primary mode of research.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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