I'm doing my best to tell this user that their imagination is possibly on to something, but mostly this is a waste of energy. I'm exaggerating the realistic possibilities to help them feel good about themselves because it makes it easier to sneak in the idea that this is not a useful or productive line of thought.
The approach of "Smart people have thought of that, there are very few chemically useful alternatives" is the kind of thing that entrenches a person in their insistence that this is just a wide-scale failure of imagination. Witness their comment about "earthlike biology perspective". They want to believe a wider, weirder universe is possible. As a rule, it helps people feel heard to tell them they're right about something.
So yes. I'm going to present it as a staunch certainty that something else is possible but currently unknowable, invisible, and irrelevant. I'm doing this in the hopes that the message gets through that this is not simply parochialist arrogance at work, from which they might nobly dissent.
The approach of "Smart people have thought of that, there are very few chemically useful alternatives" is the kind of thing that entrenches a person in their insistence that this is just a wide-scale failure of imagination. Witness their comment about "earthlike biology perspective". They want to believe a wider, weirder universe is possible. As a rule, it helps people feel heard to tell them they're right about something.
So yes. I'm going to present it as a staunch certainty that something else is possible but currently unknowable, invisible, and irrelevant. I'm doing this in the hopes that the message gets through that this is not simply parochialist arrogance at work, from which they might nobly dissent.