Is NASA Really on the Verge of Finding Extraterrestrial Life?

When I was a kid, NASA's space programs played a major role in inspiring my interest in science. So it saddens me today to see how the space agency, to justify its share of the federal budget, overstates the case for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life. Such claims from NASA are a staple of Internet journalism, virtually unavoidable if you go online. Unfortunately the best available science, including a new paper by our colleague and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, demonstrates that the problem of supporting life on a hypothetical exoplanet is much, much tougher than NASA suggests to the public.