Gbaikie, thanks for saying it better than I ever could have.

I must say Nick's article is the best-argued case against the success of SETI that I have ever seen. And very well-written into the bargain.

Perhaps the danger in leaping to a judgment as final as the one Nick renders comes from the Universe's capacity to surprise us? As you aptly demonstrated through the two exceptions you presented, the Universe has more tricks in its hat than we have theories about its tricks.

Or, as someone else once put it, the universe is stranger than we can imagine.

Nick's article still does a fine job pointing out something we humans will be forced to realize at some point in the future: Earth's road to life is not the only road to life, and Earth's road to technological civilization is not the only road to technological civilization. We 'did it our way,' but others will do it theirs.

'Earths' - twins of our world - may be rarer than once thought. Nick's article has shown, better than any other line of reasoning I've seen, that excessive optimism about 'other Earths' may be just as foolish as excessive pessimism.