Awesome. Basically, using only three months of data, out of 1,235 potential planets, 54 were identified as residing within the "goldilocks" zone. Very neat.
Well, of course, but that's not the point. We know life can evolve on a planet with similar conditions to Earth, so they're starting to look elsewhere based upon those constraints. That doesn't negate the possibility of life existing in exotic forms in other environments, nor is the claim ever made that life can only exist on an Earth-life planet.
Damn shame this thing is 2000 light years away, or I'd say it's time to fire up a new set of probe missions.
These data are mind-blowing when you place the results in perspective. Kepler is using a 100 megapixel (!) CCD to look at about 150,000 stars (out of about 200 billion) in a single galaxy (out of about 200 to 500 billion), while being limited by the planetary transit detection method. With that in mind, 54 potential Earth-like planets were identified out of 1,235 detected bodies. If you take 54/1235 and assume that is an average, even with the conditions restricting Kepler, and multiply that by the 200 billion (or so) stars in the Milky Way, you're left with 8.8 billion potentially habitable planets just in this galaxy. (To those seemingly unimpressed, within the lifetimes of a very large number of members on this site, we've gone from not knowing if planets existed outside of our solar system to identifying numerous potential Earth-like planets. Neat.) Still I cannot help but partly feel this with the news: