Science

The way I see it is like how molds on a petri dish and human cities tend to grow in similar shapes. There are natural patterns and molecules that are useful for certain types of things, I would suspect Alien Life to stumble upon many of the same useful chemical and physical mechanisms Life on Earth has but the story of how it happened would likely be confoundingly different in surprising ways we wouldn't expect. It wouldn't be life "happening the same way" for Alien Life to have evolved based on water and carbon blueprints, rather it is more like putting a growing organism on a flat plane, there are natural rhythms and patterns that echo throughout our universe that optimizing systems will find and build upon.

I mean if you step back and think about it, if some of the basic chemical processes that Life on Earth does were possible on an Alien planet with Alien life that was unable to exploit that advantage... wouldn't that be in a way of sort of strange refutation of evolutionary theory? Why would an obvious chemical pathway be left unexploited by life in competition with itself?

Of course complexity is always a barrier, evolution isn't perfect or instant, it doesn't necessarily explore every possible solution before settling on one that is good enough in a context, but it begs the question, if the processes on Earth that are optimal for Life to Exploit are found on other planets, why would either Life on Earth or Alien Life be substantially suboptimal in its solutions compared to the other? Wouldn't that suggest some magic difference in Evolutionary capacity of Life in one place vs another in a way that crumbles away upon rational inspection?

To put it bluntly, if we have no proof the laws of physics differ elsewhere in the observable universe, why should we expect Evolution to behave differently? No matter if the characters names are different and the stories happen according to their own unique paths, we are still playing with most of the same weaving patterns.

If you had a sea full of SiO2 and CaCO3 well animals that need homes are gonna eventually stumble on that as a building material right?