Earth and biological matter

[Welsh cake]

I don’t think the universe has any more awareness of us than my liver has of the atoms that form it. I think our current senses would not allow us to conduct any form of empirical analysis to that effect, but perhaps one day before we become extinct, we might.

Sorry, but no, that assertion that we cannot conduct any research given our senses is far from the truth. We do have a whole array of evidence of the phenomena in question, we can use celestial mechanics to work out structures and dynamics of the universe through equations and there's this whole scientific study called "Cosmology" we've only been working on for thousands of years.

That's not how the scientific method works, we don't build up an understanding or knowledge base in one field of study, like for example human biology, only then to refute our own knowledge by stating "We don't know" when we can't find a second heart in our bodies. That's a ridiculously unreasonable position that rejects everything we do know about reality. Now sure, there are many grey areas that lack a clearer more transparent explanation but that's to be expected given how complex reality is.

Last time we checked 'Life' is the condition or self-replicating sequence which distinguishes active organisms from inorganic matter. All the available empirical evidence points to the universe displaying no characteristics of signalling and self-sustaining processes present in living organisms.

Now its maybe your own intuition that this cosmos is a living being, but like with theist's asserting some god-thingy outside space-time did everything if the universe is actually alive we need evidence of these characteristics first. I encourage open-mindedness and we're free to speculate what might constitute as other life forms or seek a more accurate definition of "life", but its counterintuitive to shun the available evidence as "We don't know" when it points us to the universe demonstrating no signs of being alive simply because you hold to your gut feelings that it might be.