The same can be said about Planned Parenthood.
Professor Steven Vogt , of the Carnegie institution in Washington, said he had “no doubt” extraterrestrial life would be found
Ah, another one of those annoying articles where the headline totally contradicts the article.
With comments like this, Dr. Smith is clearly an attention whore, and probably should not be teaching.
500 planets isn’t even a drop in the proverbial bucket. I have no doubt extraterrestrial life is rare, given the conditions needed for a planet to be in the habitable zone. But impossible? If even only one out of a hundred million planets is capable of producing life as we understand it, that still leaves 40 or 50 likely candidates in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
There is, of course, also the possibility that life has evolved in ways we haven’t fully grasped. Don’t want to head off into Star Trek land, but we do have bacteria right here on Earth that feed on jet fuel and other exotic materials. It’s not impossible that there is some form of bacteria or other primitive life to be found in the seas of Titan and several other moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
They have not even seen a planet nor another solar system only the effects they have on the stars they orbit the tiny little tug on the stars themselves so how can they tell anything?
Heck, I can't find intelligent life amongst 500 democrats.
He's going to have to look harder.
But the 500 planets studied are the rule. Too cold, too hot, too irradiated, too something. Study 500 million planets and you’ll find the same thing: The conditions for intelligent life are incredibly, infinitesimally rare.
Bad, bad logic and science.
The technology so far MIGHT detect Jupiter, if it were in a highly elliptical orbit, but completely miss Earth.
This is the equivalent of saying your car keys are not nearby on the ground, because it is night and you only looked in the area under the street lamp.
Hubble Deep Field images are a tiny dot of sky in the Orion Nebula magnified millions of times. 
Those aren't stars, those are galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars.
And that's just one dot of sky.
Just imagine how big the universe really is.
Is this guy serious? He must have a credibility ‘death-wish’.
Scientists are still up in the air about life on local planets. Fossil evidence seems to point to at the very least, former life on one local planet. I don’t buy into it, but some scientists do.
If we can’t be positively certain concerning life on local planets, how can we be so bold as to make a blanket statement about 500 other planets?
What may seem like an inhospitable climate on other planets, may in fact be a fantastic climate for life of another form there.
Again, we find ourselves in a situation where we just don’t know, cannot know, and yet definitive statements are being made.
I expect a number of hilarious pronouncements to be aired over the next few decades, as fools feel compelled to turn their brains inside out for public observation.
There are several important variables. The most discriminatory of these is the location of the Sun, about 3/4ths of the way to the edge from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Much further in could be too violent, and further out too exposed to tidal forces.
The second discriminator is time. The galaxy is about 15 billion years old. The Earth has existed about one third of that time, or 4.5 billion years. 3.8 billion of simple celled life. Only 200 million years of mammals.
Only 2.5 million years of the genus Homo. 200,000 years of looking more like we do today. Only perhaps 10,000 of mankind being intelligent.
So how many inhabited planets could have come and gone in that time? Remember that Earth’s life form clock has been reset several times, wiping out hundreds of millions of years in evolution.
Global Warming mania is a symptom of a collapsed rational thought ethos.
This sort of over-reaching generalization with no data to back it up from someone who should bloody well know better is worse than embarrassing, it's terrifying.
Note the title says life is impossible, but Smith didn't say that, only that conditions on Earth might be unique (which we knew all along).
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/22/stars.survey/
Excerpt:
Ever wanted to wish upon a star? Well, you have 70,000 million million million to choose from.
That’s the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers.
It’s also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world’s beaches and deserts.
Sometimes I wish we were as devoted to studying deep sea life. There’s some freaky stuff down there!
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
Chapter 17, The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is So Anxious to Establish Communication With An ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence), excerpted from
Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:
Sagan is right in saying that despite all the claims of UFO sightings and encounters of a third kind, extraterrestrial creatures, and such, not a single artifact, e.g., a piece of metal, a bit of clothing of a visitor, a piece of tissue, a fingernail, has been recovered.
Yet Sagan has written whole volumes promoting the probability of the existence of intelligent life on the billions of planets orbiting the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies -- this in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Cosmos, let alone intelligent life. Of all the billions of electromagnetic waves from the Cosmos received here on Earth, not a single one can be attributed to an ETI.
Therefore, one might ask Sagan the same question he put to UFOers: Of all the countless bits of data received from outer space, the observations of astronomers, the millions of units recorded by radio telescopes, why has not a single bit of information been received which could not be attributed to the random noise of the Cosmos?Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)
(a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovski, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spaceship in Vermont.
(b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don't talk, dolphins don't talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.
(c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.
FYI ping.