{"id":3926258,"date":"2026-06-02T08:02:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T13:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/astrobiologys-looming-statistical-crisis\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T08:02:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T13:02:52","slug":"astrobiologys-looming-statistical-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/astrobiologys-looming-statistical-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Astrobiology&#8217;s looming statistical crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Multi-billion-dollar space telescope programs aren&#8217;t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature &#8220;lies, damn lies, and statistics.&#8221; Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, it&#8217;s hard to find lots of samples of planets with alien life on them. And even harder to prove that the signals we think are caused by alien life aren&#8217;t caused by some other non-biological process. Or at least that&#8217;s the theory underpinning a new paper available on the arXiv preprint server from David Kipping of Columbia University (and Cool Worlds YouTube fame).<\/div>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2026-06-astrobiology-looming-statistical-crisis.html\" target=\"_blank\">Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Multi-billion-dollar space telescope programs aren&#8217;t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature &#8220;lies, damn lies, and statistics.&#8221; Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3926258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3926258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3926258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3926258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3926258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3926258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3926258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}