The Catastrophic Consequences of Agnosticism for Life Searches and a Possible Workaround
David Kipping

TL;DR
The paper analyzes the limitations of agnostic Bayesian approaches in life detection searches and proposes a novel two-group survey strategy to improve detection prospects.
Contribution
It introduces a new survey design dividing samples into groups with different life prevalences to retain agnosticism and enhance detection chances.
Findings
Diffuse priors lead to extremely high sample size requirements for strong evidence.
A two-group strategy can significantly increase the probability of detecting life with smaller surveys.
The proposed method faces challenges related to designing groups with differing life prevalence.
Abstract
Planned and ongoing searches for life, both biological and technological, confront an epistemic barrier concerning false positives - namely, that we don't know what we don't know. The most defensible and agnostic approach is to adopt diffuse (uninformative) priors, not only for the prevalence of life, but also for the prevalence of confounders. We evaluate the resulting Bayes factors between the null and life hypotheses for an idealized experiment with positive labels (biosignature detections) among targets with various priors. Using diffuse priors, the consequences are catastrophic for life detection, requiring at least (for some priors ) surveyed targets to ever obtain "strong evidence" for life. Accordingly, an HWO-scale survey with would have no prospect of achieving this goal. A previously suggested workaround is to…
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