Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Read more
Scientists aren’t finding alien life because they are likely searching for the wrong signals or looking in the wrong places, a new study warns.
Astronomers are mainly focused on avoiding “false positive” cases of instruments being fooled by the biology-mimicking chemistry of non-living things on other planets. However, the study says that they should consider false negatives as well. A false negative is when life is present on an alien world but it remains invisible to us because we aren’t looking for the right signals.
“We should be aware of these false-negative results,” Inge Loes ten Kate, an astrobiologist from the University of Amsterdam, said. “These shortcomings are not yet high on the research agenda.”
False negatives may yield from factors like poor preservation of biological traces, weak signals from planets or limits of existing instruments.
“Space missions and instruments are designed to detect potential signs of life, but the risk of overlooking something isn’t taken into account,” Dr Ten Kate said.
“The search for signs of life should go hand-in-hand with better-defined questions and testable hypotheses to justify specific measurement or observation targets.”
Some false negative signals may result from organic traces being too subtle to detect even when life is widespread on a planet’s surface.
The study notes that certain gases linked to life may be masked or destroyed through interactions in the planet’s atmosphere, making them difficult to observe from the Earth.
“We therefore need to understand very clearly what kind of life is possible in a particular place, what the conditions for that life are, and how we can recognise the traces of that life,” Dr Ten Kate said.
“And even then, we might overlook things.”
AI systems can prove potentially valuable in revealing signals or relationships that humans might miss, the study argues.
The researchers hope that future missions will carefully examine whether an environment might support life and whether patterns on a planet or moon might reveal hidden biological activity.
They also expressed concern that mining corporations of the future could move too quickly to extract resources from other worlds, permanently destroying unnoticed microbial life before its discovery.
“If there is life under a rock, and you only look at that rock from above, that life will go unnoticed,” Dr Ten Kate said.