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

(www.skyatnightmagazine.com)
417 points fuidani | 1 comments | 17 Apr 25 08:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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seanhunter ◴[17 Apr 25 08:59 UTC] No.43714467[source]▶
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.

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1. ninetyninenine ◴[17 Apr 25 10:45 UTC] No.43715045[source]▶
I never got this. Someone eventually wins the lottery. Someone eventually gets struck by lightning. How lucky a lucky person feels doesn’t influence the cold hard probabilities. So this feeling is mostly a delusion.

And frankly we don’t know how probable or improbable it is for life to form because we aren’t actually clear how it formed in the first place. The fact that the event has not and can’t (so far) be reproduced by us means that it is already highly likely to an extremely low probability event.

The question is how low? Low enough such that there is another planet that has it within 124 light years. I actually don’t think so.

I think the probability of finding a planet that has biosignatures of life but doesn’t have any life at all is a higher probability then actually finding planets that actually have life. No matter what you think the likelihood of finding life is, I think most people agree that the above should be true.