Saturn being basically a giant pollen-dense flower has an allegorical beauty to it

Not exactly. It could mean we're far beyond it (see my other comment). If life has a higher chance of developing in the outskirts, and needs an incredible coincidence to "land" on a more geologically interesting rocky planet closer to the system's star to develop into more complex organisms, it means we're way past that filter and a pioneer form of life.

Truth is, we don't know enough to take any filter hypothesis seriously.

After watching this behind-the-scenes video by EngineAI about this one T800 robo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoytjBgpG28), Im convinced that we will kill ourself / go extinct by these robots (if climate change doesnt kill all of us far before)

This will not be in 10 or 30 years. But in 70-100. Maybe robots are the future life form the universe "sees" here so something finally can reach outer space from here.

And I think its very likely that other civilizations aslo killed themself by inventing AI some day in their time.

Though, Claude is the best tool ever for me :)

Finding life in our solar system that we couldn't detect from Earth won't say anything new about life we don't see in other solar systems, never mind other galaxies.

It is likely that conditions for the appearance of life exist in many places in the universe, though probably not in every stellar system.

However, it is also likely that the places where living beings can evolve into something more complex than bacteria are only a very small fraction of those where life exists.

There are chances that life might exist on one or more of the satellites of Jupiter or Saturn, but it is pretty certain that it cannot be more complex than bacteria or at most protozoa, because on Earth the evolution of big multicellular living beings was conditioned by the development of the ability to extract energy from solar light.

Without solar light, the maximum rate of energy production is from methanogenesis, which would not sustain any big living being.

Solar light is too weak at that distance anyway, and life, if it exists, is burrowed at depths where the temperature is high enough, where any light is likely to be completely attenuated.

I find it fairly plausible that life exists anywhere the conditions are even slightly favorable. All you need is just enough time for some atoms to form a self-replicating configuration and that pretty much kick starts it.

It might not evolve into something very complex, though.

Not really, there has been a lot of crossover of organic-carrying meteors within our own solar system, it's pretty plausible that multiple bodies in our solar system have life from a single origin event, which doesn't say anything about the rest of the universe.

Benjamin Franklin is said to have replied, "What use is a new-born baby?" in response to a skeptic of the utility of some of the first balloon launches.

I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.

Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life? What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?

I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the walls. My clothes are made of cotton and rayon, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?

Because of statistics. If we can find life, potentially started independently or pollinated in a couple of planets close to each-other, then life is everywhere and we may be in a dark forest of intelligent or hidden native predatory beings waiting to wipe us out if we squeak or show up elsewhere. If it's not as frequent, then we can keep exploring to look for it and more human-habitable spots.

For the very same reason why the wisest of the ancient and medieval rulers were patrons of science, even if the value of scientific discoveries was not immediately apparent at the time.

It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.

Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.

A majority of the planet thinks life started here. Finding it elsewhere would culturally be a cosmic (puns) shift of before alien life existed verifiably and after.

Serious question: US spend 50+ B$ / month to throw JDAMs on little girls schools, what do we gain here?

Serious answer: on a yearly 130T$ GDP at least a good third is spent on destroying this planet. 50$B which ends up paying phds is barely one peanut.