Search for extraterrestrial life more difficult than thought  
Allen Telescope Array
What do mainstream scientists think about the search for ET?  Well, for one thing, it certainly much harder than they or anyone thought it would be - because our current search technology can produce "false positives."

Despite all of our success across a wide field of research, sometimes it's hard to remember that we're still in the early days of our scientific revolution.  We've just begun research on so many different important subjects, and the search for intelligent life in the universe is one.  We still have more to learn on how to search, what a positive result looks like, and then what are we going to do once we get a positive result.

Here's this story with a link to the research in the attribution:
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Search for extraterrestrial life 
more difficult than thought



The presence of multiple chemicals such as methane and oxygen in an exoplanet's atmosphere is considered an example of a biosignature, or evidence of past or present life. Rein's team discovered that a lifeless planet with a lifeless moon can mimic the same results as a planet with a biosignature.

"You wouldn't be able to distinguish between them because they are so far away that you would see both in one spectrum," says Rein.


"A telescope would need to be unrealistically large, something one hundred meters in size and it would have to be built in space," he says. "This telescope does not exist, and there are no plans to build one any time soon."

Current methods can estimate the size and temperature of an exoplanet planet in order to determine whether liquid water could exist on the planet's surface, believed to be one of the criteria for a planet hosting the right conditions for life.

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While many researchers use modeling to imagine the atmosphere of these planets, they still aren't able to make conclusive observations, says Rein. "We can't get an idea of what the atmosphere is actually like, not with the methods we have at our disposal."


"We should make sure we are looking at the right objects," he says, adding that the search for life within our solar system should remain a priority. He points to the recent discovery of a liquid ocean on Enceladus, one of Saturn's larger moons, as a prime example.


Rein says locating a planet in a habitable zone while being able to obtain a good resolution to model the atmosphere will help determine what's on the planet.


Related stories:
Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Toronto, original written by Don Campbell.  H. Rein, Y. Fujii, D. S. Spiegel. Some inconvenient truths about biosignatures involving two chemical species on Earth-like exoplanets. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014


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