Astrobiology's looming statistical crisis

Multi-billion-dollar space telescope programs aren’t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, it’s hard to find lots of samples of planets with alien life on them. And even harder to prove that the signals we think are caused by alien life aren’t caused by some other non-biological process. Or at least that’s the theory underpinning a new paper available on the arXiv preprint server from David Kipping of Columbia University (and Cool Worlds YouTube fame).



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