Are we alone in the universe? It’s hard to know exactly how long this fundamental question has perplexed humanity. But it’s likely that throughout history, generations of people have looked up at the stars and wondered if life is unique to Earth. In the modern era, our search for life beyond Earth has intensified thanks to an ever-growing array of sophisticated astronomical and scientific instruments and technologies.
Furthermore, our search for signs of alien biology and chemistry already has a multitude of targets. We know of 6366 exoplanets outside our solar system, and there are more than 8100 further potential candidates, both in our galaxy and even beyond it.
In our search for extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise, astrobiologists look for a variety of signs – including radio, optical and infrared signals – that may point the way to advanced civilizations. Crucially though, we look for biosignatures – a substance or structure that may be of biological origin. More recently, we have also started searching for technosignatures, which are markers of past or present technological activity, in the atmospheres of exoplanets (see box “Astrobiology at a glance”).
To help solve the problem of how best to confidently detect signs of life, some scientists are now turning their attention towards cutting-edge machine learning (ML) and statistical techniques to broaden our notions of the most promising types of signals to look for. In doing so, they hope to boost our ability to interpret the vast amounts scientific data captured by telescopes and space probes.
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