Astrophysicist professor Nikku Madhusudhan says that new compelling evidence of alien life in a distant planet is “as big as it gets” for astrophysics, and even science as a whole.
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00:00Oh, this is very big. This is as big as it gets, certainly in exoplanet science, the science of studying planets around other stars, also in astronomy in general. But I could even say it is very big from science in general.
00:16And the reason for that is that, and this is why we are very cautious, is that this is one of the most foundational questions we have been asking as a species for the longest time in our history.
00:30So it is in no one's interest to claim the detection of life beyond Earth, let alone beyond the solar system, without robust evidence.
00:39But we are on the path to it. That is the important point.
00:44So what we are detecting are molecules which have been predicted by multiple studies over the last two decades to be robust indicators of life.
00:53And we are seeing initial signs of them. And that is huge, because five years ago, no one in their wildest dreams would have thought that we would already detect such molecules with the James Webb Space Telescope, as powerful as it is.
01:08We didn't think that would come so quick. This is why we are very cautious. But if it is actually true, this is a landmark result.
01:17This is a transformational moment in our history of the search for life.
01:24So this is the reason why we are maintaining that even though we have the evidence we have, there is still a 0.3% chance of it being a statistical fluke.
01:33That's what defines the three sigma result. But we don't want to stop there. We want to go to that five sigma result where we want the chance of it being a fluke to be less than a part in a million, at least.
01:46So we want to be really, really robust. And then we can think of the interpretation.
01:49But what we are seeing so far is already interesting enough to tell us that we have the capability to do it.
01:57The living universe in these kinds of environments is within reach, within our observability, if it is there.
02:03And that is, to me, scientifically the most important aspect of this finding.
02:07So, let's see.