I don't really understand your point, but in any case don't think comparisons from so long ago are valid.

We live in vastly different times. Your examples are dealing with a time where the powerful elite ruled and the uneducated masses kept out of such matters. Today, most of the world's population is educated and literate.

Agree totally.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

OP:

We aren't debating whether it will contain all of these. The OP begins with this as a stated assumption, then asks "what will be the impact of this discovery?".

Based on Kepler's expected range of results, and the reference to Dr. Isrealian's discussion of Spectroscopy (and his prediction based on his findings so far) this assumption is at least plausible.

The trouble is, the stated premise is unlikely to be fulfilled with such certitude in reality, so the ensuing debate will likewise be somewhat contrived. Therefore, various posters felt it necessary to point that out. But either way, (predictably) there appears to be two camps: those that think there will be a big and lasting difference and those that think it will be big, but a temporary blip.

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

That reminds me of another non-earth-shattering discovery of a few years ago, one for which there are still occasional hints of something interesting going on. Interesting to the space geeks:

BAUT Forum topics NASA briefing: possible life or geological activity on Mars (more recent) and "Methane confirmed on Mars" (way back)

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People are already getting bored with, even being derisive about, repeated water and methane discoveries on Mars. Repeated discoveries of bio-gases on planets hundreds of light years distant will soon garner the same response.

The assumption stated was exactly what Dr. Isrealian predicted in the referenced video, and I used that as a premise to begin this thread. Its why I provided a link to it, so that you could understand why I felt the assumption has merit. The OP uses the certitude implied by Dr. Isrealian's prediction as a base assumption to make a particular point; Thats what I wanted a discussion on.

Dr. Isrealian also emphasized repeatedly how difficult it was to tease out the relevant data. He made it clear that it was a long and painstaking process. Proof of extraterrestrial life will not come in a blinding revelation. It will come after years of data gathering and analysis and debate of noise levels, statistical significance, and alternative explanations.

The public will be BORED TO DEATH by the time any real proofs are agreed upon. Their attitude will probably be: 'well, we knew that a long time ago, why'd it take you so long to state the obvious.'

Just saying it's quite different to suspect or believe than to know for sure.

Those discoveries challenged a powerful authority that suppressed scientific debate. That has changed a lot, agreed.

I'm not so sure about that

True, many feelings will change. But knowing that there is life on a planet 100 million light years away will not change my belief that the universal speed limit will prohibit active interaction. And those who believe that we are already being visited by extraterrestrials will not have their belief in the possibility of visitation changed.

Yes!
Thank you, centsworthII.

No doubt there's some "wiggle" room for ETs found in these texts, although they're the same snippets that are pointed to by those who think ETs have visited Earth.
They're usually dismissed then, but good!

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

To be sure, clint, but the discovery of Life beyond Earth, whether microbial or intelligent, raises a whole host of other questions about who we are, why we're here, what we're to do ... our place in the cosmos, fundamentally changing our perspective.
Into the 21st century there remain multitudes who think Earth and Mankind upon it are special, unique in some way. I think to discover otherwise will be most profound for religion, and if ETi, for science.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

I never said it would not be a painstaking process. Of course it would.

Dr. Isrealian Also said (Paraphrasing):

"If we see such a spectra as this, we can point to this one and say, there is life there on that one."

Yes, of course it would take a lot of analysis, and most of the time the public wont know anything about it until this revelation is made and then put before peer review, and public scrutiny.


"

The instruments that would make such discoveries haven't already been made yet and we are already talking about it! There will be plenty of news reports -- good and bad -- and hype on the subject over the years as programs are funded, instruments built, observations made and data analyzed.

To be sure there will be plenty of sensational headlines and false claims made in the press long before any reliable statements come from the scientists. The debate in the scientific community and in the general population will be long, and to most, boring.

Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life via faint, noisy spectra will be nothing like having it proved by the appearance of a 'manned' extraterrestrial craft on the White House lawn. In general, people find spectra irrelevant and boring. Upon learning that the proof of extraterrestrial life is a squiggly line and not a photograph, they will quickly lose interest.

Yes, but they are based on existing technology.

I am sure you are correct in that there would be a lot of hullaballoo leading up to the point where scientists will agree that the findings are a definitive proof of life. However that's not the point of the OP at all. I am just defending the OP's stated assumption that its at least plausible we could definitively identify life via spectroscopy. The OP makes this assumption in order to discuss the impact of such a finding, if it is made as Dr. Isrealian predicts.

Which is the point of the OP! How would finding life like this be different? I do hope you are wrong, I hope it would motivate us, not make us yawn.

I think this is different than finding life in our solar system, becuase we know that this solar system already has life. FInding life in another solar system is a whole other ballgame because it means the conditions we have here have also ocurred around another star. And then, likely many stars.

you could very well be right. I hope you are wrong. I for one will be extremely excited to have proof, and to have some indication of how ubiquitous life is in the universe, intelligence or no.

Personally, I think life is common but Intelligence is rare.

Indeed it does.

Although, for me personally, the confirmation of the existence of exoplanets already had this effect
- especially as it seems now that they are so literally ubiquitous.

Before that, there was always the slim chance that maybe our solar system was some freak accident of nature,
and planets extremely rare in the rest of the galaxy.

For me, that already did the job of relegating us from the category 'special/unique' to 'just-one-of-the-heap'.

clint. Agreed. The back lit atmosphere of Earth passing in front of the sun, viewed from some distant star will show us as a potential spot for life, and even for a potential spot for accelerating technological development. see:http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0423-ghg.html

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A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

No argument there!

Sounds like a good plot for a first-contact movie:
Hi there, we've noticed you have been contaminating your atmosphere for some time...

Hows about The Day The Earth Stood Still ?

Book of Mormon explicitely states that God created a plurality of inhabited worlds.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Right, the "angel" that visited and inspired Joseph Smith Jr was actually an alien in disguise!

The Book of Mormon, like its predecessors, is a redacted, edited version of earlier texts, primarily the KJV of things. I'd venture to say that Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, which predates The Book of Mormon some 150yrs, also "inspired" Smith Jr.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

To the average person who has little or no interest in astronomy or exobiology, I don't imagine it will mean much beyond the initial hype. To the scientific community, though, it will mean a great deal. That said, I don't see a realistic impact much greater than an invigoration for more sophisticated telescopic/spectroscopic missions to study it from near-Earth space.

Also, look for fierce controversy over whether the results are biological or not--probably unending, at that--within the scientific (as opposed to woo-woo) community. We have only one known biologically-vibrant planet in our toolkit, and applying those rules to planets we'll never have any ground truth for will be more difficult than it seems, especially if the data are near the edge of detectability. It was years after the discovery of 51 Pegasi before most astronomers were convinced that the planetary signature of it and other recent finds were unambiguous. Better yet, consider Mars: a planet for which we have decades of orbital, telescopic, and ground probe data, but for which astronomers are still divided between competing models over how habitable Mars once was, to say nothing of the possibility of past or extant life. For something as potentially momentous as an exo-Earth, it would be correspondingly greater, in my op.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Very well said!!

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Plan as though you will live forever, but live as though you may die tomorrow.

Ironically, one of the first things that would happen is that the conspiracy theorists would immediately try to explain how that particular planet couldn't possibly support life and it's all just government disinfo to distract from the real aliens living on the moon.