New answers tagged astrobiology
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This is still a bit vague - it's tough for a satellite to detect plants (with or without specifically looking for a chlorophyll signature) at low spatial density in a desert. If your hypothetical exoplanet were covered in a thick layer of cyanobacteria the signal would be much greater than the signal from a copy of Earth.
However, AFAIK the best we've done ...
7
Detecting chlorophyl on exoplanets is definitely something people are interested in: see this paper (published as
"Detecting biomarkers on an exo-Earth", Timothy D. Brandt, David S. Spiegel, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2014, 111 (37) 13278-13283; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1407296111), for instance. On the assumption that people are writing ...
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Just to say a little more about the "conditioned credence" section, what they are saying there is that the Drake Equation isn't the only data we have. We have also looked for signs of civilization, and there are other ways we might in the future look for civilization. And the fact that we haven't found any evidence tells us something.
A concrete example ...
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