I'm not so sure. What will the deniers say when thousands of planetary systems are being cataloged and discovered orbiting stars, which are extremely similar to earths orbit, orbiting stars similar to our own sun?
From another news release:
however, the most important thing about Gliese 581g is its closeness. Only 116 stars of any kind are nearer to us, and only 9 of these have been tracked thoroughly enough to find any such planets if they exist. The fact that one was found so close so soon, says team member Paul Butler, suggests that at least 15% or 20% of of all stars have habitable worlds.
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/104031014.html
If anything we should start investigating into building computerized machinery that can literally build themself from the ground up...literally.
Send them to Mars and terraform the planet, even Venus can be made livable in some respects in all of Earths resources were to join together...instead of living under Islamic fear.
Lets fix our problems here first before we start shipping our crap across the galaxy. I would tend to think other species may not approve of what we are and how we act, especially in the last century.
“What will the deniers say when thousands of planetary systems are being cataloged and discovered orbiting stars, which are extremely similar to earths orbit, orbiting stars similar to our own sun?”
Well, firstly, the planet in question, as others have pointed out is hardly habitable. Perhaps marginally habitable at best.
However, that’s beside the point I was making. His statement is basically, if there is water, there is life. This is a huge leap that is unsupported by evidence. We do see life most places on Earth where there is water, however, we’ve never found life anywhere else in the universe, so we can associate the presence of water and the presence of life only on Earth with any degree of certainty.
If we took some rocks and water and atmosphere, put it all in a sealed jar, and sterilized it, we could come back in a few years and we would still not find any life. The reason we find life on Earth where there is water, is because life already exists on Earth, and it will spread itself into any niche it can adapt to and survive. However, in the absence of life, we have no evidence that it would, or any concrete conception of how it could, spontaneously appear.