Is "The Pale Blue Dot" Really Special?

Before the Copernican Revolution, humans considered themselves as the pinnacle of God’s creation, believing that they were the centre of everything in the Universe. We have come a long way since then, and a very new frontier to the Copernican Revolution will turn up with the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Our Galaxy alone contains billions of stars, and we have hundreds of billions of galaxies. Statistically speaking, each one of those stars have at least one planet orbiting it, and about one in every hundred exoplanets lies in the habitable zone of the star, and can potentially bear “life”. Direct observation of these extrasolar planets is very difficult and hence we try to use remote sensing and look for indirect signs on life, the Biosignatures. In the talk we tried to understand various types of biosignatures and their detection methods. It is important to realise that collection of such data is very difficult and we are often not very sure about the conclusions we make. But probability makes us hopeful. Maybe some day, we'll be able to find them, or maybe they'll find us, and we'll finally have the answer to Fermi's question.