What has led you to believe that life, which evolved elsewhere, was in need of a planet similar to ours?

What do you mean by “life”?

Certainly life as we know it requires conditions like those we find on Earth.

How do you propose we recognise – and search for – life as we don’t know it?

Why would those beings require the same resources we do?

Simple. Entities that we would recognise as living require certain resources (energy, raw material) and are constrained by the same laws of chemistry as we are.

Why limit our search to include only criteria that meets our own needs to sustain life?

Because this way we can define things to seek out that will be fairly sure indicators of the presence of life. We know that, for example, the presence of molecular oxygen is a likely indicator of life, but it’s not a certain one, because there exist other processes that can give rise to molecular oxygen in the atmosphere.

It is ridiculous to believe that life could only evolve exactly like we have, not to mention a rather self-important view on the universe.

Well, true, but do you have any evidence that anyone is actually behaving in this way?

How close minded are we really?

Did you mean closed-minded?

There is zero evidence to show that life could not evolve under very different circumstances than we have.

True, but so what?

As I intimated earlier, how would we go about recognising and seeking life that isn’t as we know it?

Open your minds people! Consider a realm of ALL POSSIBILITY!

And perhaps you need to recognise two things:

First, scientists are indeed speculating about outlandish and bizarre forms of life, ones that use biochemistry different from that we know on Earth.

Second, the surest way to find life Out There is to find conditions that resemble those that we know can sustain life. On Earth, wherever life is even marginally possible, we find living things. Therefore, if we can find places elsewhere where we know life to be possible, we can go about identifying if it exists there as we might expect.

This would tell us about more than just whether or not life exists in one other place. If we find a place where the conditions are favourable for life as we know it, but we don’t find any life there, that in itself tells us something more generally about how likely life is in other places. If we do find life there, it tells us that life is at least likely wherever it is possible.

Interesting! I hadn’t even heard about exoplanet candidates orbiting Barnard’s star. Of course, as such a nearby star, I do hope they keep looking as the technology is improved – even a sub-Earth mass planet would be interesting. Imagine a Mars-like planet in the habitable zone, for instance!

Oh & on more suggestion – perhaps since it is “bb’ we could name it “Gun” or “King” after the respective air rifle and Blues singer respectively!
Hah! I love “King”. As an aspiring guitarist myself, I can personally think of no musician more deserving of his own planet (even if it is a rather hot and likely not-blue-at-all one)

The second one, Daedalus, was a much more realistic and intensively researched project that also used pulsed fusion propulsion but didn’t bother with the deceleration step, entering the target star system (Barnard’s star, for some reason) at 12% of the speed of light.

Pretty sure that was back when Barnard’s Star was – we now know wrongly – thought to have a Jupiter like planet or two orbiting it based on claims that were later revealed to be instrument error.

An article linked to my name here – ‘Bad News, Space Fans: Barnard’s Star—One of Our Sun’s Closest Neighbors—Is Barren’ by Ross Andersen – has more info on that and the lack of exoplanets found so far round the second nearest star system to our Sun. In a nutshell from there :

.. a group of researchers led by UC Berkeley’s Jieun Choi delivered the fatal blow to his data, when they revealed the results of 248 precise Doppler measurements that were designed to examine the star for wobbles indicative of planets around it. The measurements, taken over a period of 25 years, led to a depressing conclusion: “the habitable zone around Barnard’s star appears to be devoid of roughly Earth-mass planets or larger . . . [p]revious claims of planets around the star by van de Kamp are strongly refuted.”

BTW. Wikipedia now has an separate page for Alpha Cen Bb too.

Oh & on more suggestion – perhaps since it is “bb’ we could name it “Gun” or “King” after the respective air rifle and Blues singer respectively!