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    Signs of alien life may actually just be statistical noise
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    Signs of alien life may actually just be statistical noise

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    1. Conscious-Ball8373 on

      Well I’m shocked – shocked! – that claims of signs of extraterrestrial life turn out to have insufficient statistical rigour and to have been overblown. I literally can’t believe that this could happen. I really hope something changes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

      (/s, of course…)

    2. David_Parker on

      ….Thanks, Scully. The one time we thought there was actual life, and you and your degree had to come in and stomp on it.

    3. TequilaJesus on

      But the latest measurements were a 3 sigma result (99.7% certainty). In order to be absolutely certain, they would need a 5 sigma result (99.99994%). So this sign of alien life through a 99.7% certainty of the detection of Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) and Dimethyl Disulfide (DMDS) is a pretty good statistic.

      So as of now, there’s a 0.3% chance that is may just be statistical noise

    4. Space19723103 on

      there’s enough background radiation that, statistical noise may actually be alien life.

      there are 3 types of lie: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

    5. RobbyRobRobertsonJr on

      Well call me shocked, you mean the so called Earth 2 that is 4 time the earths mass and orbiting a violent red dwarf star is not teeming with life and has aliens looking back at us.

    7. DarthFister on

      Paywall. Are they saying they re-did the statistical analysis and it isn’t actually 3 sigma? Or are they just latching onto the 0.3% chance this is noise?

    9. TheMasterofDank on

      Even if we saw them, they are so far away, it almost doesn’t matter. But I guess we can say when we meet them; we saw you well before we met you.

    10. AutonomousBlob on

      If only we could read the article you posted lmao. I know the claim was 99%+ certainty, is this article just saying “its not 100% yet” or is it challenging the certainty??

    11. Braincoater on

      The world’s most powerful country elected an idiot as it’s leader so I don’t think our alien overlords would actually place another living planet in close proximity to us at this stage of our civilization.

    12. Andromeda321 on

      Astronomer here! This has been quite the drama on the last week, it’s fair to say, but here’s the summary.

      1) [A paper](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8) was written by a team from Cambridge stating they found evidence of a biosignature, which was in the form of a spectral line for a given molecule. While the paper itself was cautious about their findings, the subsequent press release from Cambridge was… not, and included lines from the lead author like “The signal came through strong and clear.” This obviously gives a rather different impression, and the news ran with it.

      2) Immediately when this came out, other astronomers were rather skeptical (including former members of this group, to add to the drama). Some because they think the atmosphere of this planet is sufficiently different to Earth, that while *on Earth* this molecule is only made via life, on a planet with water and a hydrogen atmosphere that isn’t a sure bet. But even *more* telling is what this article is about- I can’t read the article without paywall, but pretty sure it has to do with t[his preprint paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15916) (note, not yet accepted, probably bc they wrote it in less than a week and peer review takes longer). In it, they explain that effectively it’s not just a question of “do other processes make this signal”- it’s a question of “did the first group even do this analysis correctly in the first place?!” They relied on something called Baysean statistics to say the signal is significant, which can easily be screwed up when translating to a level of confidence for reasons I won’t go into here. But yeah, not ideal.

      3) In all this, we should mention that this same group a year or two back claimed they found a potential biosignature using this model in another exoplanet, which later groups showed was a flawed model and analysis for that particular system. Sooo yeah.

      Conclusion: science is hard, and I think it’s fine to write papers like this. What I’m a tad more skeptical of though are there’s 0% chance this group wasn’t vetting the press release and its tone, which is very much not in line with the findings here and allowed it to be snapped up all over the world (also note that JWST and ESA didn’t do a press release themselves, which is kinda telling in itself). As I’ve been telling people in the past week who have asked me, and then got mad about my skepticism, I want to find life elsewhere in the universe but don’t like getting my heart broken, you know?