Primeval Soup Selection

The dedication page of this NRC report is whimsically universal:

Dedicated To Non-Human-Like Life Forms, Wherever They Are

An early remark in the introduction is parochially profound:

Nothing would be more tragic in the American exploration of space than to encounter alien life and fail to recognize it.

The whole report is 100+ pages of hard-sci analysis in favour of seeking serial geneses and the perils of what they call terracentrism (or, on p69, geocentrism): the tendency to generalise from the single example of a functional biochemistry we have i.e. Earth's. There are, it is well known, more things in heaven and earth and all that, and our minds are such limited, little, local things. One recommendation seeks those terrestrial geneses: "search for life that stores its heredity in chemicals other than nucleic acids". (via)