Astrobiology has delivered remarkable insights into extremophiles and exoplanet atmospheres, yet no confirmed detection of life beyond Earth exists. Its critics argue that the field's grandest claims rest on speculative statistics and that funding might be better directed toward unambiguous terrestrial problems. Its defenders counter that framing the search for life as mere longing ignores how it drives instrument innovation and forces rigorous thinking about biology's limits. The tension is whether a discipline defined by an absent subject can still be called empirically grounded.