A new mission concept that would see a fleet of telescopes probing rocky planets in their stars' habitable zones should be able to tell us how common life is in the universe — even if the mission doesn't find any life at all.
"A simple positive detection would change everything," said astronomer Daniel Angerhausen of ETH Zurich in Switzerland in a statement. "But even if we don't detect life, we'll quantify how rare – or common – planets with detectable biosignatures really might be."
