“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me.

Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life developed here I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too given how incredibly unfathomably vast the universe is.

If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long.

If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.

>It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now.

Or they've reached their technological plateau millions of years ago. Like we did 50 years ago.

>And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived.

We know for a fact that life have existed on Earth for >2 billion years.

> Or they've reached their technological plateau millions of years ago. Like we did 50 years ago.

What a bizarre thing to say, considering this very discovery leans on decades of science and engineering over the past 50 years!