Call for a Framework for Reporting Evidence for Life Beyond Earth

Abstract

Ours could realistically be the generation to discover evidence of life beyond Earth. With this privileged potential comes responsibility. The magnitude of the question, "are we alone?", and the public interest therein, opens the possibility that results may be taken to imply more than the observations support, or than the observers intend. As life detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialog about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated, and has high potential to be sensationalized. Establishing best practices for communicating about life detection can serve to set reasonable expectations on the early stages of a hugely challenging endeavor, attach value to incremental steps along the path, and build public trust by making clear that "false starts" and "dead ends" are an expected and potentially productive part of the scientific process. Here, we endeavor to motivate and seed the discussion with basic considerations and offer an example of how such considerations might be incorporated and applied in a proof-of-concept-level framework. Everything mentioned herein, including the name of the confidence scale, is intended not as a prescription, but simply as the beginning of an important dialogue.

12 pages, 1 figure, 1 table

References in corpus (2)

• A Statistical Comparative Planetology Approach to the Hunt for Habitable Exoplanets and Life Beyond the Solar System
• Probing the capability of future direct imaging missions to spectrally constrain the frequency of Earth-like planets

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE): V. Diagnostic potential of a mid-infrared space-interferometer for studying Earth analogs
• The Case for Technosignatures: Why They May Be Abundant, Long-lived, Highly Detectable, and Unambiguous
• Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats
• Retrievals Applied To A Decision Tree Framework Can Characterize Earth-like Exoplanet Analogs
• Photobombing Earth 2.0: Diffraction Limit Related Contamination and Uncertainty in Habitable Planet Spectra
• What if we find nothing? Bayesian analysis of the statistical information of null results in future exoplanet habitability and biosignature surveys
• Communicating astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere: speculations and promises of a developing scientific field in newspapers, press releases and papers
• Information Gain as a Tool for Assessing Biosignature Missions
• Astrobiology in the Time of Artificial Intelligence