Even if life is not found on other planets, clever survey designs and careful statistics can still reveal how rare, or common, life really is in the universe.
What would happen if we scanned dozens of distant planets looking for life, and found nothing? A team led by physicist Dr. Daniel Ungerhausen explored this question. They asked what we could still learn about life in the universe if future space missions didn't find evidence of it.
The new study uses a Bayesian statistical approach to estimate how many planets one would need to observe to draw meaningful conclusions about the prevalence of habitable worlds.
How many planets are enough?
The researchers found that if 40-80 Earth-like exoplanets were scanned and none showed signs of life, a so-called “perfect” null result, we could reasonably conclude that fewer than 10 to XNUMX percent of the similar planets harbor life. In our galaxy, that XNUMX percent would still amount to around XNUMX billion potentially habitable planets. Even without life being discovered, such a result would allow scientists to set a significant upper limit on the prevalence of life in the cosmos, something that has eluded them until now.
But there is a catch. Even a “perfect” zero result has uncertainty, which can affect the reliability of the conclusions. One type of uncertainty, interpretation uncertainty, is related to the risk of a false negative result—cases in which signs of life are present but not detected. Another type of uncertainty, sampling uncertainty, is related to biases in the types of planets selected for observations. For example, if the sample includes planets that are not truly capable of supporting life, the results can be misleading. Understanding and accounting for these uncertainties is essential to drawing sound scientific conclusions from future planet-hunting missions.
ask the right questions
“It’s not just about how many planets we observe – it’s also about asking the right questions and how confident we can be that we are or are not seeing what we are looking for,” says Angerhausen. “If we are careless and overconfident in our ability to detect life, even a large survey can lead to misleading results.”
Such considerations are highly relevant to future missions such as the international LIFE (Large Exoplanet Interferometer) mission. LIFE aims to study dozens of exoplanets similar in mass, radius and temperature to Earth by searching for water, oxygen and more complex signatures of life in their atmospheres. The good news, according to Angerhausen and his colleagues, is that the number of planned observations will be large enough to draw meaningful conclusions about the prevalence of life in Earth's galactic neighborhood.
Still, the study highlights that even with advanced instruments, uncertainties and biases need to be carefully accounted for and quantified to ensure that the results are statistically significant. To address sample uncertainty, for example, the authors note that specific, measurable questions such as “What percentage of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone of a solar system show clear signs of water vapor, oxygen, and methane?” are preferable to the much more vague question “How many planets have life?”
Bayesian vs. Frequentist Perspective
Angerhausen and his colleagues also investigated how assumed prior knowledge—known as priors in Bayesian statistics—about observed variables would affect the results of future surveys. To do this, they compared the results of the Bayesian framework with those obtained from another method, known as the commonality approach, which does not have priors. In the kind of sample size that tasks like LIFE focus on, the influence of the chosen priors on the results of the Bayesian analysis is found to be limited, and in this scenario the two frameworks give comparable results.
“In applied science, Bayesian and inferential statistics are sometimes interpreted as two competing schools of thought. As a statistician, I see them as alternative and complementary ways of understanding the world and interpreting probabilities,” said co-author Emily Garbin, who focused on the inferential analysis and helped validate the team’s results and their approach and assumptions. “Slight changes in the scientific goals of a survey may require different statistical methods to provide a reliable and accurate answer,” she noted.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
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I just wanted to point out that the speed of light is much higher than 300 thousand kilometers per second, and that the way to measure it using interferometry is wrong.
Soon you will see photos taken on other stars.
They didn't get here at the speed of light.
They got here in a different way.
The time it took the aliens to get these images from there to here is exactly zero.
This is not speed. This is something else.
Details and pictures coming soon.
In the meantime, look at the images taken by Webb, and ask yourself if what you see is truly a delusion, or if they were created by quantum intelligence.
The article and the hypothesis about life are not correct in any way. The materials that make up life and were created in supernova explosions were scattered throughout the universe and are still falling on Earth, without them there would be no life, therefore there is life in space, those whose life developed at a different pace and direction than ours and those who are still in the process of becoming stronger. We are small and very limited in terms of environmental research and do you really think we are the only ones? Earth is the birthplace of the dinosaurs and we are just the result of disasters and accidental genetic mixing.
You will know soon.
If you want to know sooner listen and watch Billy Meier's Tape 10.
11 is also highly recommended.
He received the information from the Pleiadians.
Extraterrestrials know the secrets of the universe and life much more than we do.
What is important is that the universe (and another 10 to the 49th power of universes, according to estimates) was created by intelligence and not randomly by the Big Bang.
Look at the JWST images.
Scientists have already discovered "galaxies" that were from the Big Bang era, which have too much light and energy in them for this to be possible. Their conclusion is that these are additional universes.
The truth will come out soon and it will amaze the world.
Try to get out of your fixation.
Our universe is full of life, a small portion of which is much more advanced and intelligent than us, and all of them, except for one, were created by intelligence, what religions call "God."
But the personal God, ours and that of other religions, are extraterrestrial.
The universe is teeming with life.
It's clear!!!
You must act with creativity, patience, and perseverance.
It will come…
Of course, they will not find life on other stars because there are only 7 stars that have life in them only in our galaxy (which contains over 100 billion stars) The distance from them to us is millions of light years, the closest is 37 million light years away. With today's human technology, we have no way of getting there, seeing them, or communicating with them. There is a greater chance that they will reach us before we reach them. As stated, according to the Holy Zohar, there are 7 stars with living beings. That science has not yet discovered
And there are only 2 possibilities to discover them. One is that we will succeed in achieving the technology of flying 100 times the speed of light, which science denies because it claims that there is no speed higher than the speed of light. But the reception in the Zohar does indeed have a speed greater than light. Including the possibility of moving between parallel worlds. Which are called abymes.. through tubes called black holes… at a speed of 100 times the speed of light… and even 1000 thousand times the speed of light. And the second possibility is that the creatures will reach us. And indeed there are records that they are already here, only humans are not yet ready to receive them, and therefore they do not reveal themselves openly, but here in secret. And they do not destroy us because it is clear to them that this is not a sucker in power. Like if they put a bully in his 20s with a 3-year-old baby into the arena. What are the chances? It is clear that they have nothing to harm the incompetent like us.
May there be blessings and success…
…If I assume that the world was created by chance from a completely random explosion …and we humans were created through an evolutionary process and all life on Earth was created through a random and natural process
So it must be assumed that somewhere in infinite space there are worlds with more developed, less developed creatures...
Even though all signs show that there is nothing there.