> And just because life on earth is fragile, it doesn’t mean all forms of life have to be.
When it comes to life made out of molecules, there aren't that many viable options for "base components".
For example, carbon based lifeforms like stuff on Earth can harvest energy from food without spending too much energy while remaining stable enough to avoid falling apart.
Silicon has somewhat similar properties, but its compounds require stricter conditions to be useful for hypothetical life.
Some amount of fragility is actually a good thing. Not for an individual, but for life in general. Animals harvest "building blocks and fuel" for themselves from other life forms that should be "fragile" enough to eat. All the advancements of evolution are possible due to mistakes in DNA replication that should be fragile enough for mutations.
That's all true for life as we know it. But this conversation was about hypothetical life in forms that we haven't yet discovered, nor possibly even imagined.
You edited out the important part of that quote. Swapping out carbon for silicon is hardly imaginative enough to be worth mentioning when we are talking about potential forms of life completely outside what we might expect.
We have examples in popular culture already that are neither fragile nor organic: sentient machines.
Im not saying that the universe is full of Transformers and Terminators. Just that searching for silicon based life isn’t all that different to search for carbon based life when you consider that life is just a sophisticated machine and you can literally build a machine out of anything.
If it can't die it's not alive