Do you think scientists are qualified to define life

We only know how to look for life that resembles our own. If it doesn't, we don't know what it should look like, because we haven't studied it yet, if it exists at all. But we do know quite well how our type of life evolved. Apparently your idea instead is to not bother looking at all? Or to randomly call things a sign of life? That's not how science works.

EDIT: Your post was fairly insulting, and clearly meant to be. No one is claiming we've found life anywhere. Quite the opposite so far. Maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?

You have it backwards. Scientists say "life as we know it" because they DO realize that there may be life that doesn't fit that pattern. But when you're committing years of time and millions of dollars to searching for something, common sense suggests looking in the more obvious places first.

No. I think it's far better left to the imaginations crackpots on the internet. That will be far more useful than taking any kind of reasoned approach based on available evidence.

Is there anyone more qualified?

Actually, I'm a bit hesitant to answer 'no' even to that question. Scientists may be very good at what they do, but it does seem that they often have trouble thinking outside the box. This is why we get definitions such as 'evolution' being 'a statistical shift in allele frequency in the chromosomal DNA of cellular life forms'; biologists came up with that because it makes it easily quantifiable, at the expense of the capacity to capture what we actually mean when we use the term. Defining 'life' has itself run into similar problems. I find this not just disconcerting, but bordering on orwellian. And I'm in agreement that, even if we do have to leave this stuff up to scientists, we should at least demand that said scientists take the real sense of the term into account, rather than being entirely chauvinistic towards their own fields (which is the problem right now).