I think what the article is trying to say is to open your mind to the possibility of different life forms outside of the carbon-based box we live in. ie: Anti-matter/dark matter life or something just as foreign for us to understand.
Just because we can’t define it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
My two cents worth.

oh, i get that part. my mind is open to the possibility; the sci-fi that immediately springs to mind involves sagan’s floating jupiterian creatures (non-terrestrial though ultimately carbon-based), and of course the near god-like energy beings of clarke’s “2001: a space odyssey” — maybe even the anti-hero of every “aliens” movie. indeed, interstellar space is about as alien and hostile a place as we’d want to visit, so “life” may take on a whole new meaning out there, quite literally. whatever. all i’m saying is that, wild speculations aside, and given what is known about how the the planet earth and the forces that form(ed) it affect whether and how life evolves, the chances of something like “life” developing from a substance other than carbon seems vanishingly small.

Just because we can’t define it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

My two cents worth.

i don’t think is as obvious as you imply. given the vastly greater propensity for carbon to bond to itself and other compounds in very long chains — its nearest competition is silicon, a member of the same chemical family but far inferior in its abilities to combine.

sure, the universe is staggeringly huge… but to argue that anything is possible is to float free of the empirical. could a world that shares the same laws of thermodynamics and rules of chemistry, that supports complex living things, truly be so “completely different” from our own?