Related papers: Deconstructing Alien Hunting
One primary reason for the formulation of the term Earth-like planet and the search for such planets in the galaxy is because life has arisen in such a world. Thus, this search seems justifiable as it is known here what one is looking for.…
The discovery of exoplanets has both focused and expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The consideration of Earth as an exoplanet, the knowledge of the orbital parameters of individual exoplanets, and our new understanding…
Can information theory provide insights into whether exoplanets are habitable? Here we apply information theory to a range of simulated exoplanet transmission spectra as a diagnostic tool to search for potential signatures of life on…
We present a new framework to characterize the occurrence rates of planet candidates identified by Kepler based on hierarchical Bayesian modeling, Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), and sequential importance sampling. For this study we…
Two decades ago, empirical evidence concerning the existence and frequency of planets around stars, other than our own, was absent. Since this time, the detection of extrasolar planets from Jupiter-sized to most recently Earth-sized worlds…
In multiple domains such as malware detection, automated driving systems, or fraud detection, classification algorithms are susceptible to being attacked by malicious agents willing to perturb the value of instance covariates to pursue…
Almost all SETI searches to date have explicitly targeted stars in the hope of detecting artificial radio or optical transmissions. It is argued that extra-terrestrials (ET) might regard sending physical probes to our own Solar System as a…
Bayesian optimization is normally performed within fixed variable bounds. In cases like hyperparameter tuning for machine learning algorithms, setting the variable bounds is not trivial. It is hard to guarantee that any fixed bounds will…
Surveys searching for transiting exoplanets have found many more candidates than they have been able to confirm as true planets. This situation is especially acute with the Kepler survey, which has found over 2300 candidates but has…
In this hypothesis article, we discuss the basic requirements of planetary environments where aerobe organisms can grow and survive, including atmospheric limitations of millimeter-to-meter-sized biological animal life based on physical…
(abridged) We develop Bayesian methods and detection criteria for orbital fitting, and revise the detectability of exoplanets in light of the in-flight properties of Gaia. Limiting ourselves to one-planet systems as a first step of the…
The search for life has two goals essentially: looking for planets with Earth-like conditions (Earth similarity) and looking for the possibility of life in some form (habitability). Determining habitability from exoplanet data requires that…
It is often claimed that Bayesian methods, in particular Bayes factor methods for hypothesis testing, can deal with optional stopping. We first give an overview, using elementary probability theory, of three different mathematical meanings…
We present a comprehensive multivariate statistical analysis of 517 exoplanets from the NASA Exoplanet Archive to identify potentially habitable worlds and quantify detection bias in current surveys. Using eight key parameters (planetary…
The Higgs boson is the most important, though yet undiscovered ingredient of the standard model of particle physics. Its detection is therefore one of the most important goals of high energy physics that can guide future research in…
We are often interested in identifying the feasible subset of a decision space under multiple constraints to permit effective design exploration. If determining feasibility required computationally expensive simulations, the cost of…
As a guide for astronomers new to the field of technosignature search (i.e. SETI), I present an overview of some of its observational and theoretical approaches. I review some of the various observational search strategies for SETI,…
One of the most exciting scientific challenges is to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy and search for evidence of life. The ability to observe and characterise dozens of potentially Earth-like…
Within the next few years, the first Earth-mass planets will be discovered around other stars. Some of those worlds will certainly lie within the classical "habitable zone" of their parent stars, and we will quickly move from knowing of no…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…