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Patience !
Hi All,
I'd have to agree that while this particular planet holds a potential to be a habitable one, the probability is still fairly low that it would be a place that is capable of sustaining life of any sort, let alone multi-cellular life, let alone advanced life, let alone intelligent life. And for each one of those steps up the scale, you can "add" a 10^-2 or 10^-3 to the probability score.
However with the data from Kepler that will reduced and analysed over the coming several months, I think it is likely that far better prospects than this planet will be announced in the reasonably nearby future.
Getting a spectrum of this small world when it is no more than a few million km from its (by comparison) overpoweringly brilliant parent star to look for bio-markers in any possible atmosphere is fraught with technical problems that won't be solved very soon. Hopefully, over the next few months some more promising candidates will be announced that are more distant from their parent stars and will be less of a technical challenge (though still an extremely big ask) to obtain meaningful specta from.
I am perfectly prepared to have an open mind, but from what I've seen on the subject, I am still of the opinion that life is probably rare or even very rare in the galaxy, advanced life (like plants and animals) *extremely* rare at best and intelligent life (i.e self-aware, capable of making and using tools and manipulating the environment to their advantage) something like trillion-1 chance -- if not much worse.
Space-faring races I think are even rarer than that.
I'm perfectly happy to be proved wrong. If they land on the White-House lawn tomorrow, or send us an unambiguous proof of their existence I'd be perfectly happy to shake hands (pseudopodia etc) and say I was wrong. I just don't think it will happen.
Best,
Les D
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