![]() The chairs of the workshop, Victoria Meadows of the University of Washington and Heather Graham of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, are each on the steering committees of these groups, which are sponsored by NASA but include members from many other institutions. While the idea for a workshop came from NASA officials, it was organized and many of its ideas were developed under the auspices of the agency’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) initiative and its Network for Life Detection (NfoLD) group. For example, a 90 percent probability might be considered a robust finding that life had indeed been found. This raising of confidence is essential because any “discovery” will likely be reported in terms of probability. But there’s a lot of discussion to be had first about biosignatures and how to evaluate and raise confidence in claims being made about them.” “This may involve changes in how things have traditionally been done-for instance, for a research team to have frank discussions with other scientists in their field before submitting a paper for publication. Hoehler said the group that organized this week’s workshop had some sense of what might be needed, but wanted input from the larger community. One was Tori Hoehler, a research scientist at NASA Ames who focuses on the habitability of environments beyond Earth and the detectability of any life that may reside there. Green and Mary Voytek, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA, began seriously discussing the need for new life detection reporting guidelines last year, then brought in a number of NASA colleagues. “What we envision is a scale to be worked through by the community a more formal assessment of confidence they can use to describe how far along in detecting life a finding might be.” ![]() “You have to examine potential false positives, whether there are ways to form the chemical, whether the measurement is an artifact of your instrument, whether the environment on the planet is conducive or hostile to life, whether water is present.”Īpplying such a chain of reasoning could result in a kind of credibility scale for the general public to turn to when they read about new results in astrobiology. “The discovery of a potential biosignature in atmosphere is important, but it’s just the start,” said Green in an interview. The hope is that this will lead to formal “best practices” and perhaps even reporting protocols for scientists working in the field. They’ll be hashing out issues ranging from how to increase scientific confidence in “biosignature” detections to how best to convey the level of confidence in new discoveries to non-scientists. Some researchers in the field worry that recurring strife puts the credibility of astrobiology at risk, or diminishes the actual scientific importance of some findings because they are ultimately found not to be life detections.Īs a result, more than a hundred scientists representing a variety of disciplines are convening (virtually) under NASA auspices this week. As far back as the Viking exploration of Mars in the 1970s, and as recently as last year’s speculations about possible life in the Venus atmosphere, claims of possible extraterrestrial life have been met with strong pushback and contentious debate from other scientists. With more such claims expected in the future, NASA’s Chief Scientist Jim Green and his colleagues have become increasingly interested in coming up with community standards for evaluating such findings. All the steps in this research are challenging, but the last step may be the most daunting of all: How to prove to fellow scientists that claims about extraterrestrial life are sound, then how to communicate the findings to the public in a responsible way. ![]() ![]() The burgeoning field of astrobiology and its search for life beyond Earth has high hurdles aplenty, from hunting for habitable exoplanets to trying to understand life as we don’t know it.
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