michal_dubrawski

I am updating slightly based on the reply which @ctsats got from the head of the HWC, Prof. Abel Méndez (https://twitter.com/ProfAbelMendez) (Impresive work Christos! Thank you for sharing!) Especially professor's guess of the number of planets added this year (as 5 to 10). We must however note that if my previous analysis is right (see my previous forecasts here) 7 exoplanets were added to the catalog this year (6 from 2023 and one from 2015), as I explained here, professor likely counted some of them as if they were added the previous year - otherwise he would say 7 to 10, right? So it is hard to interpret how many (if any) he already counted for this year, and our period of analysis is different, it doesn't include January this year, but in fact includes January 2025 (despite 31st of December 2024 being mentioned in the question title). Still, we have a full-year period that way and unless this high assessment from the professor if heavily based on the planets already added to the catalog this year before the question was published and not counting towards the resolution, this assessment is still useful information.   

Reducing slightly. Before I dig deeper into the WayBack Machine it is hard to evaluate how likely are new additions from the previous year, and what is the real cause behind these additions (I wrote about some possibilities I came up with, below).

I still wonder why they added the one from 2015 this year - they already have potentially habitable exoplanets  from all years since 2013 in the catalog, and we have 8 from 2015 (5.1% of all 875 exoplanets discovered that year), while we also have 8 for 2014 - only 0.9% from all 875 exoplanets discovered that year. 2016 also has a low share of habitable worlds in comparison to 2015 - only 11 from 1517 (0.7%). I wonder what is the cause behind these differences. I still need to understand the process of evaluating habitability of the exoplanet better - maybe for some methods we don't have enough data to judge if the planet is potentially habitable if other observations are not made? Maybe some new information about K2-3 d changed the previous assessment of its habitability? Last update in P_UPDATE column for this exoplanet is from 10.07.2023, so that would make sense. I must read more about this exoplanet.
Also do they have three values: 1) potentially habitable, 2) not habitable, and 3) not known/not enough data? Or maybe the research team behind the catalog is still evaluating some of the exoplanets found in the past? My intuition tells me that this is more likely because of new data, like about new information about the water world ("LHS 1140 b is a potentially habitable water world").

Also, I wonder about the candidates awaiting confirmation - if confirmed, would they be assigned as a year of being discovered to the year of first spotting (when they become candidates) or the year of confirmation? There is so much I do still not know about all this.

Tagging @Tolga @martinsluis @belikewater @404_NOT_FOUND @ctsats @cmeinel @probahilliby @PeterStamp @ScottEastman @NoUsernameSelected @DimaKlenchin @WeirdAwkward @guyrecord @Perspectus @JJMLP  

By finding the url address of the previous version of the catalog website and by analyzing archived versions of both websites (for details, please see my a bit chaotic rationale here and comments to it, especially this and this) , I was able to on the previous  was able to establish that this year there were 7 exoplanets added to the catalog as potentially habitable, including one added on March 21 after the question has started (it is TOI-904 c - publication about it is from December 2023 - do not to confuse it with LHS 1140 which was already in the catalog - see this comment for details), so this one counts towards 5 needed for the resolution as "yes".

So the planets added this year are all 6 discovered in 2023:
TOI-700 e 

TOI-715 b

HN Lib b

Wolf 1069 b

GJ 367 d

TOI-904 c (added to the catalog on the 21st of March, so it counts toward the resolution, but it shows that some potentially habitable exoplanets discovered in the late 2024 might not be added to the catalog in time to be counted for the resolution, so this kind of nullifies advantage we got from TOI-904 c being counted late)

The last exoplanet added to the list this year is K2-3 d and what is critical information, it was discovered in 2015 (see this comment for how I established it). So now we know that the researchers behind the catalog are not only adding the most recent discoveries but are also analyzing exoplanets discovered in the past (see this chart) - without further analysis of archived data it is hard to say how often they find something they have not yet found in the previous years, but 2014 and 2016 gave them a lot of material, and they might be still analyzing some of it. So there is a chance that this will be a source of some additions to the catalog this year (or in January 2024) as well.

Tagging @404_NOT_FOUND @ctsats @cmeinel @probahilliby @PeterStamp @ScottEastman @NoUsernameSelected @DimaKlenchin @WeirdAwkward @guyrecord @Perspectus @JJMLP 

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy: The greater my knowledge increases, the more my previous ignorance unfolds.  It is great to be with a team with awesome thinkers like @ctsats and others here, who never stop digging deeper and challenging their own understanding of the matters we forecast about. Highly recommended comments by Christos are here and here.

*** UPDATE: 2024-03-30 - I was wrong about the P_UPDATE column in my rationale I presented below - see my comment below or follow the link. ***

So, the insight about Kepler no longer being active for years cannot be read strongly since as @ctsats explained, there are still 3353 candidates exoplanets found by Kepler which still wait for confirmation or disconfirmation, and about 5000 candidates in total.

Now, things get interesting because the discovery rate is not the same as the rate of updating the catalog on resolution website and as @ctsats pointed out the year of discovery is not equal to the year of exoplanet being added to the catalog.
The most recent update (March 21st) added TOI-904 c to the catalog. This exoplanet was discovered in 2023 (This publication listed here was published on December 7 2023), so we may think that there is a time lag of 3,5 months between publication of the article announcing the discovery and the planet being added to the catalog. But the problem is that as Christos mentioned, this is the third planet added to the catalog this year (in fact seventh if my analysis below are correct). We can confirm this with WayBack Archive for the copy of the website from the 9th of January this year: https://web.archive.org/web/20240109164551/https://phl.upr.edu/hwc

  So before the question was published they added two more planets - I initially assumed that the most recent ones were added to the top of the list that would give us: 
TOI-700 e

TOI-700 d

So the problem is that TOI-700 e was announced in this publication from February 16, 2023  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acb599 and reported in the news in March https://theconversation.com/distant-star-toi-700-has-two-potentially-habitable-planets-orbiting-it-making-it-an-excellent-candidate-in-the-search-for-life-198274 this suggest about a year delay, much longer than with the latest publication.

 And TOI-700 d was discovered on January 3, 2020 (Wikipedia specified the daily date, often I only see there a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOI-700_d) and the publication is from August 14, 2020: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aba4b2

I read this shortening intervals between the publication and addition to the catalog that the team behind the Habitable Worlds Catalog is themselves catching up to with the publications. So their three recent additions covers between 2020 and December 2023 but we now have 6 habitable or potentially habitable exoplanets discovered in 2023 in the catalog. This looks like they were adding both recent ones and some from the past. There is potential that they will add more exoplanets, which were discovered in the previous years but are not yet in the catalog. 
@ctsats I think we can learn more by the WayBack Machine on Archive.org, the trick is to know that the catalog has chaned its name and because of that also the website. I found the previous url by looking at Wikipedia editions history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets&oldid=1209717803 the previous url is https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - if we work on that archived links we can learn how fast they were adding the exoplanets to the list and how often the list was updated (unfortunately interactive list of planets doesn't work in the recent versions of the website and many of the archived versions doesn't even have the number of planets visible - the total number is visible from December 2022). A year before the question opened there were 63 exoplanets on the list so they added 7 till now  https://web.archive.org/web/20230228020942/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog but what is interesting the archived version from 31 December 2023 still shows 63!  https://web.archive.org/web/20231231171144/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - That would mean that they added 7 exoplanets to the catalog this year around the time of reorganization related to creating the new website in January this year.

What is interesting, between December 2021 and December 2022 the catalog was updated only once: https://web.archive.org/web/20221204232019/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog - we can see 61 exoplanets here.
before that, we can see on version from December 2nd 2022  https://web.archive.org/web/20221202224039/https://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog "Last Update: December 6, 2021" - but in the csv we can see that they have been doing more updates to the catalog that year (see my table below - not all updates mean that the exoplanet was added, at some cases information about previous exoplanet was updated).

We previously established that P_Year is a year of discovery, P_Update must be the last update date of any column. If based on the WayBack Machine archived version from 31 December 2023, we now know that 7 planets were added to the catalog this year, than we know that this must be some of the 8 with most recent update dates from this year, in the eight case I guess some other column was updated rather than it being added to the catalog. See my table below:

(sorry, one exoplanet from 2023 is not colored above - my LibreOffice Calc keep crushing and I lost the table)

This means that from the 7 added this year at most 2 were from 2023, and at least one was from 2013 (because there are two exoplanets from 2013 and at leat one must have been added this year).

If they keep up with this rate of public updates and if they will still be adding exoplanets discovered in previous years I think it makes it very probable, but I am not sure how they are organize -  maybe the current updates are based on the past months of work, and new updates may require similar months of work. At the same time, if the additions are mostly from the previous years that unfortunately might mean (depending on the Question Team intentions), that resolution criteria may not fit well to the question of new exoplanets being found to be habitable since these exoplanets might have been found to be habitable many years ago. I guess the scientists behind the project put their own work into the habitability evaluation process and not only copy the results from others work, so that still makes sense because it becomes less about discoveries of new exoplanets and more about discovering exoplanets habitability.      

I am going slightly down since I got this answer from the INFER team as a reply to my request for clarification about the cyberattack: "This question is concerned with a cyberattack that damages or interrupts the normal functioning of critical infrastructure as mentioned in the clarification, rather than theft of data/intelligence gathering that could lead to such harm in the future." So not all successful cyberattacks count, even if they were directed at the critical infrastructure (like data theft and probably also disclosing stolen information or publishing disinformation on the Iranian government websites which would create any public reactions affecting the critical infrastructure).

Gonjeshke Darande, the hackers group behind the previous attacks on Iran (including the one on gas stations from December last year) is worth watching. They proved to have the capabilities and motivation to do something like that, however they might choose some other kind of cyberattack - not necessary affecting critical infrastructure again. It looks like they have their profile on X: https://twitter.com/gonjeshkedarand?lang=en and a channel on the Telegram: https://t.me/s/gonjeshkedarandeofficial. 

This report from 2024-02-21 states: "The escalation comes at an inopportune time for Iran, which is also among world leaders in terms of using cyber warfare as a tool of statecraft. We assess Iran will diminish its overt military footprint and focus more on activity in cyberspace." My thinking is that if Iran will, in fact, be more active with cyberattacks, it makes high-profile retaliatory cyber-attacks such as those affecting Iranian critical infrastructure more likely.

I am going slightly up because of the tensions around Taiwan (good weekly updates are published by ISW - recent one is here) and the already present political pressure on the Microsoft related to their business in China (you can read about it for example here). If something big happens around Taiwan (or in some other place because of hostile actions of China) US law-makers could force Microsoft to leave China or the pressure on them might be so big that they would do that by their own decision. I am not high on that, but this is something which I see as something which could lead to the resolution of this question as "yes".

It is extremely unlikely now that he will cease to be the president in one month's time. 

So, I looked deeper at the data, and as I suspected in my previous comment (and my wife knew it already) behind the outlier results in 2014 and 2016 was one specific mission: Kepler space telescope. Kepler was responsible for the discovery of 90% of exoplanets discovered in 2014 and 85% of the discoveries made in the record year 2016. It was also responsible for 49,9% of discoveries of exoplanets in the dataset.

What is important, Kepler was retired by NASA on October 30, 2018 after it ran out of fuel. In the dataset, we can still see discoveries of exoplanets attributed to Kepler after 2018 - even last year (70 discoveries, we can say it was a good year for Kepler), but the numbers are lower now (2021 was still the third-best year for Kepler) with an irregular downward trend. I assume that the discoveries were made in later years based on the analysis of images previously collected by Kepler.  

Its mission is continued by Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) since 2018, but it was not that effective as Kepler, but it seems to be getting better over the years. See my table below with the most efficient projects/observatories over the years. Relative formatting is applied to each row to show changes over time.

Kepler might still be a source of a substantial number of discoveries of exoplanets this year (last year it was 70), or it may bring little to the total number (in 2022 it was 4), but we should not expect numbers like in 2014 or 2016 from it. Based on that, I am further reducing my probability slightly to 56%.

My thoughts: Base rates and Laplace rule are useful for forecasting, but if the causal mechanics/driving forces behind the numbers change, our expectations should also change. But this correction, of course, becomes subjective, and may make us even more vulnerable to the influence of biases. See a great comment about that by @ctsats : https://www.infer-pub.com/comments/121097

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