This Is Not Evidence of Life on Asteroids

I'm on record as saying we will probably find evidence of life in the form of replicator chemistry (more common parlance, von Neumann probes) on asteroids and comets. My reasoning is here.

There was a recent paper in the Journal of Cosmology on this very topic which has come in for a good deal of bashing. Like many theories, my theory is a good story. But good stories are a dime a dozen. So now we need evidence to support or falsify the hypothesis.
Unfortunately, after this paper, we still have none.

Habitable Exoplanet Discovered by Mid-2011?

That's the prediction in a forthcoming PLOSOne paper. Wow. H/T Tyler Cowen. Note that habitable doesn't necessarily mean oxygen atmosphere to these authors; understood that they want to build a model based on frequency and distance-from-star at which planets are being discovered, and there's no data to put in the model anyway. Still, an atmosphere is important if you want to call a place habitable.

More importantly: let's say it's August 2011, and it's happened. What government is going to justify spending money to send probes there? None of us is going to live to see the data. I hope we go, but there's a whole different kind of political problem between watching a moon landing, and watching probes slip off into the interstellar darkness forever, at least from the viewpoint of those currently living.