At the end of yesterday, there was a discussion of astrobiology at NYU, and then this morning I had email from Rix about a probability calculation for p(habitable|data) where "habitable" is the bit "yes this exoplanet is habitable" or "no it isn't" and "data" is whatever you have measured about an exoplanetary system. He was inspired by this paper. We discussed briefly by email; one of the issues (of course) is that many of the parameters that might determine habitability do not even indirectly affect the observable (at present day) properties of the exoplanet. That's a nice problem; it reminds me of my conversations about extraterrestrial life: Prior information informs the current debate much more than the data do; it is a playground for Bayesian reasoners.
No comments:
Post a Comment