Astrobiology's Looming Statistical Crisis

Multi-billion dollar space telescope programs arent only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature lies, damn lies, and statistics. Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, its hard to find lots of samples of planets with alien life on them. And even harder to prove that the signals we think are caused by alien...