Water Not a Good Enough Guide To Find Alien Life

An anonymous reader noted an article in Cosmos that questions the conventional wisdom of the "follow the water" strategy of seeking extraterrestrial life, saying "There's an awful lot of places where water could exist — either on the surface of the Earth, or deep within it — yet life is largely concentrated in a small sliver of this."

Comments

Re:But without water, there's no life (as we know

[Mashdar]

I just want to reiterate what the parent said, as I'm becoming frustrated with all of the "why do we assume it can't exist if it is not like us" posts.
No one is claiming life cannot exist without water, we are only stating that life as we know it cannot. Since we have no idea what the hell we would be looking for otherwise, and since we have limited (and in the search for ET life, extremely limited) we have to determine some heuristic for our search. Since water is A) easily detected with telescopes, and B) a requirement for life as we are aware, it is so far our best means of refining our search. There may be some amazing form of X based or X requiring life out there, but since we do not know X, it is not at all helpful to acknowledge its possible existence. If, on the other hand, we happen upon X based/requiring life, we can then include X in our parameters.
Please stop assuming that this is some circa 1900AD Newtonian Physics style oversight.