While life only ever formed once on our planet, it arose spontaneously, meaning that with the right mixture of molecules and environmental conditions, the same and similar reactions would occur on other planets.

The interesting thing will be: do we receive radio signals from there? Or maybe more scientific: a spectroscopic analysis of the planet might reveal if there are organic materials there maybe?

Yeah, this is a fallacy too :P

It's the most reasonable. Silicon, for example, would not allow animal life. It would require too high a temperature.

I imagine some plant analogue would be feasible. Though am still skeptical.

I'd buy microbial.

The options for life are infinite. Other life, including what we might define as intelligent, may exist on our own planet. We can't perceive it because we aren't built to. We can't comprehend it because it is outside our current understanding.

I'm just going to go over there. In that direction.

Meh. Even if it eventually got colonized, the ping to that place would be terrible ;P.

Of course we also limit our perception and understanding by the act of defining it ;~p

Language increased our potential for understanding while also limiting it.

Not to mention the mindworms.

An interesting observation. However, there are a few more things to think about regarding that.

How do we know that life never started more than once? The truth is, we don't. What we have is a probability that life never survived for very long more than once. But then, one of the prime properties of life is competition. Once life had started and spread throughout the planet (and life, once started, spreads very quickly indeed) it would be in a prime position to out-compete any newer, and therefore more primitive, forms of life that might arise.

In other words, life could have started several times. It could even start anew on a daily basis, and we would never know about it, because it would never gain a foothold anywhere, since every niche is already occupied by a much fitter species which has had a couple of billion years to get its act together.

In order for any form of newly created life to leave behind clues for us to find, it has to be at least moderately successful. I don't think that is possible once the environment it arises in is already teeming with older lifeforms.

Regarding the newly discovered planet itself, I doubt very much that it's habitable, but it may be a question of definitions. I don't take the word "habitable" to mean "able to sustain some form of life", but more along the lines of "able to sustain human life". If the planet is truly tidally locked, then I don't think it'll ever be able to sustain human life. Oh, I've read sci-fi stories about tidally locked planets having a narrow habitable band in the twilight zone between the day side and the night side, but I don't think that could ever work in reality.

Still, they're finding new planets every day. Surely it's only a matter of time before they find one that, from this distance, might as well be Earth. Of course, from this distance there is not a lot they can say about it with certainty, but sensor technology is improving all the time. Sadly, the same thing cannot be said of space flight technology, so once they do find a prime candidate for colonization, we won't have any way of getting there.
I don't think we can do that yet. Any spectrographic information from the planet would be drowned out by its sun at this distance. I think the way it mainly works is that they deduce the existence of planets from the minor perturbations they cause in the sun's orbit. They deduce the mass and the planet's orbit the same way.

Can anyone verify this? Or am I just talking out of my ass here? (I so often are).

Is it? I don't see why this must be. We might find that model here. But that doesn't mean it's the model elsewhere. Furthermore, our very definition of the properties of life, may be limiting our perception of it. Other forms of Earth based life might literally be existing right before our eyes, yet we can't perceive it; nor will we ever know it if we limit what we're looking for to that which we already know.

A tidally locked planet supporting life? That'd be a hell of a trick.

Supposedly they can keep a magnetic field on their single rotation.

If we haven't changed by the time we get there, it won't be habitable for long.