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    Alients Life 2384

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    Abdul kareem
    While searching for signs of life on other planets, scientists may fail to recognize biological signatures that are unlike anything on Earth. Our understanding of what constitutes evidence of life and what environments can support it is constantly evolving. When exploring the unexpected, researchers can only interpret data based on current theories and may miss important findings that don't match expectations. Prior beliefs and assumptions can bias what is noticed and considered significant.

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    Alients Life 2384

    Uploaded by

    Abdul kareem
    15 views1 page
    While searching for signs of life on other planets, scientists may fail to recognize biological signatures that are unlike anything on Earth. Our understanding of what constitutes evidence of life and what environments can support it is constantly evolving. When exploring the unexpected, researchers can only interpret data based on current theories and may miss important findings that don't match expectations. Prior beliefs and assumptions can bias what is noticed and considered significant.

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    While searching for signs of life on other planets, scientists may fail to recognize biological signatures that are unlike anything on Earth. Our understanding of what constitutes evidence of life and what environments can support it is constantly evolving. When exploring the unexpected, researchers can only interpret data based on current theories and may miss important findings that don't match expectations. Prior beliefs and assumptions can bias what is noticed and considered significant.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    15 views1 page

    Alients Life 2384

    Uploaded by

    Abdul kareem
    While searching for signs of life on other planets, scientists may fail to recognize biological signatures that are unlike anything on Earth. Our understanding of what constitutes evidence of life and what environments can support it is constantly evolving. When exploring the unexpected, researchers can only interpret data based on current theories and may miss important findings that don't match expectations. Prior beliefs and assumptions can bias what is noticed and considered significant.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 1

    If we discovered evidence of alien life, would we even realise it?

    Life on
    other planets could be so different from what we’re used to that we
    might not recognise any biological signatures that it produces.

    Recent years have seen changes to our theories about what counts as a
    biosignature and which planets might be habitable, and further
    turnarounds are inevitable. But the best we can really do is interpret the
    data we have with our current best theory, not with some future idea we
    haven’t had yet.

    This is a big issue for those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life.
    As Scott Gaudi of Nasa’s Advisory Council has said: “One thing I am quite
    sure of, now having spent more than 20 years in this field of exoplanets …
    expect the unexpected.”

    But is it really possible to “expect the unexpected”? Plenty of breakthroughs


    happen by accident, from the discovery of penicillin to the discovery of
    the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
    These often reflect a degree of luck on behalf of the researchers involved.
    When it comes to alien life, is it enough for scientists to assume “we’ll know
    it when we see it”?

    Many results seem to tell us that expecting the unexpected is


    extraordinarily difficult. “We often miss what we don’t expect to see,”
    according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Simons, famous for his work
    on inattentional blindness. His experiments have shown how people can
    miss a gorilla banging its chest in front of their eyes. Similar experiments
    also show how blind we are to non-standard playing cards such as a black
    four of hearts. In the former case, we miss the gorilla if our attention is
    sufficiently occupied. In the latter, we miss the anomaly because we have
    strong prior expectations.
    Watching this video shows how you can miss something as unusual as a gorilla if your attention is diverted.
    There are also plenty of relevant examples in the history of science.
    Philosophers describe this sort of phenomenon as “theory-ladenness of
    observation”. What we notice depends, quite heavily sometimes, on our
    theories, concepts, background beliefs and prior expectations. Even more
    commonly, what we take to be significant can be biased in this way.

    For example, when scientists first found evidence of low amounts of ozone
    in the atmosphere above Antarctica, they initially dismissed it as bad data.
    With no prior theoretical reason to expect a hole, the scientists ruled it out
    in advance. Thankfully, they were minded to double check, and the
    discovery was made.

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