There have been a lot of false alarms through SETI in the past. Obviously this would be incredibly cool, but there are a lot of caveats, including that our definition of a planet "being able to support life" is a pretty narrow one, given that it is limited to carbon-based life forms, usually with liquid water and "mild" temperatures.
I've always argued this point with friends and family, very arrogant to assume our atmosphere is the only one capable of supporting life forms.
The point is though, it's the only one we KNOW can support life. If you have a virtually infinite number of planets to search for life, then you have to narrow it down a bit because your chances of just randomly pointing your telescope at the right planet are infitesimally small. As our atmosphere is the only one we know can support life, makes sense to start looking for atmospheres like ours and work out from there.
Right, and I didn't get the impression that DA was criticizing that, it's just that (as we've seen on our own planet) the possibility for life is not limited to carbon.
I saw a documentary on SETI a couple years back. They are very cool. They basically evolved from begging and borrowing telescope time after having their federal funding revoked to being a pretty robust program (with a telescope array being built for them by UC Berkeley). What they do it search for the near impossible, which is damn romantic if you ask me.
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