Interesting interview.  I have followed Dr. Seager's work for years.  We are near to getting more information about a lot of these questions.  Mostly due to the larger telescopes that are coming on line.  It appears that if you want data on exoplanets, the size of these telescopes really matters, and we are just on the cusp of building machines that can give us some data on the atmospheres of the nearest exoplanets.  I do not know if life is abundant or rare on locations other than our planet, but we will soon have better data with which to formulate an opinion.