We didn't invent the bar. We hold to it.
A verdict is only as good as the standard behind it. Vyom adopts the community's own consensus — the Confidence-of-Life ladder and the Standards-of-Evidence checks — and implements them as a reproducible, audited pipeline. Same bar for every world.
The Confidence-of-Life ladder
Green et al. 2021 · Nature 598, 575A candidate spectral feature is present in the data above instrument noise.
The feature survives data-reduction, instrument-systematic, and stellar-contamination checks — it is real, not an artifact.
The species is plausibly produced by life, in a habitable context for this planet.
Every known non-biological pathway for the species, on this planet class at this temperature, is ruled out.
The signal is confirmed in a second instrument, wavelength, or epoch — not one visit's quirk.
Independent lines of evidence (companion molecules, disequilibrium pairs) point the same way.
Follow-up leaves no credible non-biological explanation. A claim the community can keep.
What a claim must pass.
Distilled from Green et al. 2021, the NASA Ladder of Life Detection, and the Meadows et al. 2022 standards workshop. Vyom scores every verdict against all seven — and shows you which ones fail.
Signal reality
The feature is in the data — not a reduction artifact, not stellar contamination.
Retrieval calibration
The posterior is calibrated (coverage ≈ nominal), not a prior read back to you.
Statistical significance
Multiple-testing-corrected significance, not a raw n-sigma headline.
Model adequacy
A posterior draw actually fits the data, and no better model is being ignored.
Abiotic null ruled out
Every published abiotic route to the species, at this temperature, cannot reach the retrieved abundance.
Biotic alternative preferred
Bayesian model comparison favours a biotic-plus-abiotic model over abiotic-only.
Reproducibility
The verdict reproduces from released code, data, and the pre-registration.
See all seven scored live, and watch them change as you toggle the corrections, in the verdict console →
What we claim. What we refuse to.
- ✓A uniform, pre-registered, ML-accelerated Bayesian retrieval applied identically across the public JWST archive.
- ✓Calibrated posteriors in seconds per target, with simulation-based calibration and a nested-sampling cross-check on every critical claim.
- ✓A verdict placed on a published standard of evidence — the Confidence-of-Life ladder and the seven Standards-of-Evidence checks.
- ✓Reproducibility by construction: released code, released data, and an OSF pre-registration that fixes the analysis before the verdict.
- ✕A life-detection claim — the pipeline does not yet clear the community bar (the K2-18 b-style stellar-contamination model, S1, is still being completed).
- ✕Re-reduction of raw JWST data — Vyom consumes published, provenance-tracked stage-3 spectra; it does not reduce pixels.
- ✕Discovery of new planets, or proprietary-data analysis — public archive only, proprietary periods respected.
- ✕Beating large institutional teams on single-target depth — Vyom's edge is breadth, uniformity, and neutrality, not exotic per-target chemistry.