Muddy Puddle.

A miserable day, but fed up with trying to make do with an indoor photograph so went out regardless and photographed this muddy puddle; there are a lot of them about at the moment, can’t imagine why.
 
When I first started Blipping, I was a regular reader of New Scientist; I’d been reading it for about 50 years and, since it took me slightly longer than a week to read each issue, I was about 50 weeks behind with my reading. A year later, and I was 100 weeks behind, it seems that Blip had taken over from my comic so I cancelled the subscription. The pile of back issues still sits there waiting to be read.
 
Something over six years ago, a topic of discussion in the magazine was the possibility of finding extra terrestrial life, and the question was what the requirements were to make a planet habitable for life. Most of the protagonists were a little specific in that they were only considering “life as we know it.” While I don’t claim to be a connoisseur of science fiction, I do know that both the writers behind “Star Trek” and Douglas Adams in the “Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” were happy to embrace alien life-forms that were not based on the element carbon. It is now my understanding that the consensus of scientific opinion has moved away from believing that alien life travelled to Earth on the back of a meteorite to supporting the hypothesis that the first life on Earth originated in the soup around the oceanic thermal vents: an environment very far removed from that which we experience which resulted in organisms far removed from those with which we are familiar.
 
The point of this story is that one correspondent countered this narrow-mindedness by postulating a sentient microbe, inhabiting a puddle, deciding that life was not possible outside of his particular puddle; after all, It was very unlikely that there would be another depression anywhere that was the right size and shape to accommodate his puddle which was so essential for all forms of life which he knew.