▲ | echelon 7 days ago | |
Radio signals are bunk. The transit method is where it's at. While the transit method won't find all planets, it'll certainly find a lot of them. And with spectroscopic imaging, we'll be able to read the atmospheric spectra of these planets and have pretty good guesses for what's happening on them. Do you think we'll find organics? Biosignatures? Technosignatures? The survey should give us a good feel for what's out there. And as we gather data, we'll have a clearer picture of the rarity of life, intelligent or otherwise. | ||
▲ | godelski 7 days ago | parent [-] | |
Sure, but that's a completely different conversation. We're talking about life, not habitable planets. Detection of planets is a step in the right direction but only because it helps us narrow candidates. We were already certain those planets existed without confirmation. The Fermi Paradox is about the difficulty of confirming life while there's such strong evidence that life should exist elsewhere. These signatures only strengthens the "paradoxical" nature of the Fermi Paradox. Also, mind you, many of those signatures come through radioastronomy. |