Evidence of life on another planet?

Question

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070424_hab_exoplanet.html

Answer 1

By itself, this finding is suggestive and significant, but it's really just a beginning.

Life seems to occur on Earth wherever liquid water and "free" energy may be found -- even deep within the ground and even in significantly acidic environments containing sulphuric acid. It really would be incredible to posit that life has only occurred just on our one planet, given the billions of stars and planets which exist just in the Milky Way.

With that said, inductive reasoning (if x then y; we have y, so we may have x) is less secure than deductive reasoning (if x then y; we have x so we know that y also occurs). We can't say for sure that life exists on this planet, only that the conditions which we associate with life (primarily liquid water) are likely to be present and that, therefore, life may also be present.

It is reasonable to assume that there are hundreds of millions of planets with liquid water. However, we have only recently been able to make observations of any extra-solar planets (237 being reasonably well confirmed as of May 2007), let alone to confirm that one or more really has liquid water.

The significance of a report like this is that the planet at least may have liquid water, so let's invest in space telescopes which might allow us to detect light reflected from the planet (such light potentially containing a signature of water in the frequencies which come through).

Personally, I think it is incredibly important for us to understand the size of the Universe and our place in it, so I would support funding for such telescopes. Such telescopes also provide a lot of information about basic physics, which information really does get used to improve our science and technology (and perhaps to identify meteors which could hit the Earth?).

However, talk about sending people into deep space, even to Mars, is a bit wacky. As the other responder has observed, it would take hundreds of thousand of years to travel to even a fairly close system. Lets focus our resources where we get more scientific return on the dollar -- robotic missions, space instruments, etc. -- not on sending people back to the Moon or onward to Mars. Its a wonderfully romantic notion, but we don't have a lot of money to throw around. Let's learn a bit more about what's out there before we talk about heading out there ourselves.

Answer 2

There is no evidence. This planet could be covered in sulfuric acid for all we know. By the way at shuttle speeds, it's only 800,000 years away.