701151 wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2012 at 3:58pm:

Plus, even if there is life outside of our solar system, the question is: Will it be intelligent like us?

I hope not since I'd actually like to receive an answer on how to e.g. stop wars about fictional resources (money) or the ones needed for running our 'modern' machines. But I'm afraid the answer could be 'Dear humans, your problem on the wars will, within a short time, solve itself. So long and thanks for all the fish!'  :D :-/

More on the topic. I wonder how you guys define the word life. As said, I'm noticing religious influences in some answers and phrases. Surely being poetic at times.
On the scientific view, I personally don't know if the focus on 'needs water, needs the same conditions as on Earth' helps when it comes to all (imaginable) forms. We can surely look for water and then hope for some kind of life form, even former ones, being somehow similar to what we know. This makes sense because you not only have to find it, but you also should be able to detect it.

But if you think away from the carbon based life forms, the possibilities are unimaginable big and even the value of intelligence is something being hard to measure. You'll find very intelligent patterns in bacteria, a virus or parasites, not all of them being understood and you certainly wouldn't relate the word intelligence to a single occurrence of those forms.

Well, to say it with some greater words. You gotta know what you are looking for in order to find it. Focus on the wrong thing and you may pass by new forms of life without even noticing. Hence the question from above, what is life?

As a help, you could look into what projects like SETI define as their 'patterns' since just recording all possible signals ends up with a truckload (or two  ;D) of data and little to no use.