Related papers: Deconstructing Alien Hunting
Over a period of several decades a concerted effort has been made to determine whether intelligent life exists outside of our solar system, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. This has been based primarily upon…
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
Exoplanet detection in the past decade by efforts including NASA's Kepler and TESS missions has discovered many worlds that differ substantially from planets in our own Solar System, including more than 150 exoplanets orbiting binary or…
A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to…
For more than 60 years, the predominant SETI search paradigm has entailed the observation of stars in an effort to detect alien electromagnetic signals that deliberately target Earth. However, this strategy is fraught with challenges when…
The number of potentially habitable planets continues to increase, but we lack the time and resources to characterize all of them. With $\sim$30 known potentially habitable planets and an ever-growing number of candidate and confirmed…
As discoveries of multiple planets in the habitable zone of their parent star mount, developing analytical techniques to quantify extrasolar intra-system panspermia will become increasingly important. Here, we provide user-friendly…
We revisit and generalize the concept of composite likelihood as a method to make a probabilistic inference by aggregation of multiple Bayesian agents, thereby defining a class of predictive models which we call composite Bayesian. This…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
A detailed presentation of hypothesis testing is given. The "look elsewhere" effect is illustrated, and a treatment of the trials factor is proposed with the introduction of hypothesis hypertests. An example of such a hypertest is…
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability extraterrestrial civilizations' existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations. In general, solutions to Fermi's paradox come down to either estimation…
Context. In exoplanet searches with radial velocity data, the most common statistical significance metrics are the Bayes factor and the false alarm probability (FAP). Both have proved useful, but do not directly address whether an exoplanet…
Recently, several researchers have claimed that conclusions obtained from a Bayes factor (or the posterior odds) may contradict those obtained from Bayesian posterior estimation. In this short paper, we wish to point out that no such…
The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…
Over the past two decades, enormous advances in the detection of exoplanets have taken place. Currently, we have discovered hundreds of earth-sized planets, several of them within the habitable zone of their star. In the coming years, the…
In astronomical and cosmological studies one often wishes to infer some properties of an infinite-dimensional field indexed within a finite-dimensional metric space given only a finite collection of noisy observational data. Bayesian…
Direct imaging of exoplanets requires to separate the background noise from the exoplanet signals. Statistical methods have been recently proposed to avoid subtracting any signal of interest as opposed to initial self-subtracting methods…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…
Standard maximum-likelihood estimators for binary-star and exoplanet eccentricities are biased high, in the sense that the estimated eccentricity tends to be larger than the true eccentricity. As with most non-trivial observables, a simple…